#ttrpg guidance

[taylorannnx]

(TTRPG) Freelancing Resources

Similar to my D&D Writing Resources post, here are some amazing resources for people who are (aspiring to) freelance (in the TTRPG industry).

Doing The Work

There are three interviews with Carlos Luna that I 100% recommend:

1) "Artwork is 365 degrees" - Adventuring Academy

2) "Pass the Vibe Check" - Three Black Halflings

3) Episode 94 - Creative Block

In all 3 of these interviews Carlos gives easy to remember, actionable advice on how to approach freelancing that can be applied to most industries (though references tend to be TTRPG specific). Following this advice helped me so much in 2022.

If you still have a Twitter, you should also go follow @AJoyce_Rivera, who regularly shares freelancing advice and wrote advice on becoming a freelancer and experience & compensation in the TTRPG industry.

And for people who think "This is too much content to consume" let me TL;DR 1) Create to spec 2) Meet your deadlines 3) Communicate clearly and promptly 4) Build up to doing the Hard Work every day TTRPGs is a more accessible industry than ever. Don't sleep on these resources.

Getting The Work

For freelancers looking to enter the (American) Convention Circuit this year for work opportunities, go watch and subscribe to @bananachangames's YouTube channel. Videos I recommend are:

Convention Tips: https://youtu.be/ba2ODK0lpjU

Con Expectations: https://youtu.be/G5Hw5y2NC08

(Also the Big Bad Con vlogs)

Banana gives lots of practical advice and explanations of how the (American) convention circuit works. If you're looking to start going to conventions to meet industry professionals, watch these videos and take notes!

[zenaquaria]

Character Portraits

Three of mine and one of my husband's character portraits!~ Two tieflings and two half-drow.

First two are my Tall 'n' Scary Felfyre Rendikyr, and CptTritium's fancy half-drow bard boy Findrel Urwyn! Findrel is a top-class thespian from Gildenheim who's run into some fey trouble, and has employed fey-savvy Warden Rendikyr for protection.

Third one is my girl Guidance Liesterden, a former pony now a tiefling, and an Abjuration major at the Arcane College! Well, before she volunteered as an emergency caster for the war effort in The Risen War. And last one is my half-drow adventurer-newbie Syl Yllunera! She's met up with some other folks in the Ulei'Var fey realm of Elsewhere, and she's determined to poke into holes and flip rocks over and indulge her curiosity!

Do not repost, edit, alter, trace/copy, use/redistribute my artworks without my prior permission.

[clumsiestgiantess]

Headcannon for gtWACs day 26

I feel like Tserem would enjoy playing TTRPGs, possibly as a cleric main

He’d first find TTRPG endearing like a children’s game, and play just to keep the humans happy.  However, I think halfway through a quest he’d start getting sucked deeper and deeper into the worldbuilding and characters.  By the end, he’d want to redo his character to better suit himself rather than choosing whatever random thing he’d chosen just to play the game.  Next time, he’s coming excited and prepared with a whole backstory and little sketch of his character (which is just a human with some wings).  He’d likely play as a rogue.

[retrokid616]

and we back on the guidance off

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i keep having a lot of thoughts about like, modularity in tabletop systems/hacks, and how i wish there were more shorthand to denote 'do what's most fun for you, there's like three different ways to implement this mechanic if you want to implement it at all, but this is what it's For and how whatever you do with it will affect your game.' it vexes me

[utilitycaster]

I like that the Raven Queen, who made the decision to take on an immense and (at least to her understanding at the time) unending responsibility is the one who calls Bells Hells out on their endless indecision.

It's been...interesting, shall we say, tracking this "party of NPCs," and tracking the fandom response throughout. The initial reception to "party of NPCs" was actually a rather cold one. This took place early in the campaign, prior to the Gnarlrock fight, and at the time a lot of people who shipped Imogen and Laudna were actually extremely resistant to the idea that Imogen was the "main character" of the campaign (as seen in the fallout from the gnarlrock fight, in which the bulk of attacks from the fandom were on Imogen). I've had complicated feelings on Taliesin's reads of this campaign specifically - he tends to have a very good understanding of his own characters that doesn't necessarily expand beyond them - but that phrase was indeed pretty valid. I think about the WBN interludes, in fact, in which the cast plays using NPC statblocks, and what a true party of NPCs for Bells Hells would look like, since it would be quite simple to draw up.

Allied NPCs in TTRPGs rarely act without guidance from the PCs. I've cast a critical eye in the past towards certain meta (particularly romantic in nature, regarding Yeza or Essek or Gilmore not making moves) for this reason, because while villains and antagonists move throughout the world generating obstacles, allies exist to be directed. They have their limits, of course; they have their own priorities and motivations and cannot be persuaded against their nature, but they can be guided at oblique angles from the GMs initial intent given enough work from the PCs. They're still people with thoughts and feelings and dreams, to an extent, but rarely do they make decisions that would conflict with those of the PCs.

That's the problem with a party of NPCs. NPCs take direction. They serve as support, but they're not in the driver's seat. And the Raven Queen has noticed.

The attitude within the fandom towards "Party of NPCs" became far more positive over time, and I wonder if it should have. People began to lean perhaps too heavily on how Bells Hells were people from nothing and nowhere, discarded. This is of course objectively false when comparing across parties (can we really say Imogen had a worse childhood than Vex? Chetney to Caleb? Even Ashton to Fjord?) but were it true, that in and of itself wouldn't be a problem. D&D backstories are often tear-stained and blood-soaked, full of unjust accusations, dead or neglectful parents, failure and regret. D&D is a game about coming from very little but a disproportionately good stat block for a commoner. It is unavoidably about amassing power. Starting off as a party of NPCs is fine. You should not still be a party of NPCs at the endgame.

I mentioned the gnarlrock, and I've mentioned an emphasis (or overemphasis) on this party's lack of agency and I think that remains the problem. Ludinus's villainy is rich, complex, and multifaceted, but a consistent element of it is his eternal false insistence that he - Martinet, founder and head of the Cerberus Assembly, Archmage - is just a little guy, chaff in the wind of the will of the gods, without free will of his own (he says, as he places his thread outside the reach of the Matron). That too is a theme in fandom discourse: free will and intent. Is Imogen justified in being angry at Laudna for breaking the rock if that wasn't Laudna's intent? (yes.) Is Orym on a quest of vengeance, with a death wish? (no, but if he were it wouldn't matter.) Was it wrong to pressure Fearne to take the shard instead of letting her make her own choices? (yes.)

Did any of you, perhaps in preschool or kindergarten, since that's about the age when this happens, have someone pull your hair and for adults to say "it's because they like you?" I find this is a good way to convey the importance, or unimportance, or intent. Because when your hair is being pulled, at least if that is the extent of the problem, it doesn't matter if it comes from the misguided affections of a four-year-old admirer who doesn't know how to use their words, or a six-year-old who just grabbed the most obvious material with which to test the limits of the safety scissors, or an eleven-year-old bully. Your hair is being pulled and you want it to stop. It doesn't matter if the person secretly likes you or if they want to hurt you; it matters that no matter the intent behind it, they are doing so. And if you reject the affections of your fellow preschool classmate because you think they might pull your hair, that's a fair consequence.

Bells Hells' indecision is some sort of cosmic hair pulling. They have reasons for faltering, and some of those reasons are understandable balking at an immense weight placed upon them and some of those reasons come from a deeply self-centered place in which their individual pain is used to blot out the suffering of countless others. But in the end, even that doesn't matter. Their histories don't matter. We don't need another series of introductions of where they come from and what they've done. We need people who can make decisions and who will act.

The Raven Queen seems to have been convinced they will. I'm not sure. But I think we are in agreement that inaction is, regardless of the intent behind it, no different than active harm. It would be irresponsible to continue to be a party of NPCs; if they truly are lost and forgotten fuck-ups, they have a responsibility (as the god of death once did) to abdicate and find a replacement.

[zakbfree]

JUST LAUNCHED - ANIMON STORY: LEGEND’S WAKE

Animon Story: Legend’s Wake is now live on Kickstarter!

Legend’s Wake is a new Pokémon-inspired expansion for Animon Story, the TTRPG about Kids & their Monster friends!

Click here to become a backer!

Originally released in 2021, Animon Story is an original ‘monster taming’ roleplaying game inspired by beloved anime and video games such as Pokémon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, and more. Players create a Kid character and an evolving monster buddy called an Animon. Together, they go on adventures, meet all kinds of animon, battle and evolve, and build the bond of friendship between them!

Legend’s Wake expands upon the original Animon Story rulebook in every way, providing more depth, more options for players and GMs, more guidance for running the game, and a fully developed setting and campaign to play out of the book, or customised to your liking!

Journey across the Dunia Region, a place where humans and animon live alongside one another. This is a world of both tradition and progress, where sparkling modern cities meet rustic rural villages. As new technology confronts ancient legendary powers, can harmony truly be found between humans and animon?

The Legend’s Wake expansion is presented as both as digital PDF and physical hardcover book, which will be produced upon successful funding of this Kickstarter. Alongside the book, a brand new Animon Card Deck is being funded. The deck will contain 50 illustrated tarot-sized cards, along with game stats, making them a stylish and useful addition to your Animon Story campaign.

The core rulebook, Ani-thology! adventure collection, and original card deck will also be available for backers of the ‘Newcomer’ reward tier, or as add-ons, so this campaign is also perfect for those who are new to the game.

Back Legend’s Wake on Kickstarter now! 

Early pledges are greatly appreciated, as it will help the campaign get off to the best possible start.

[tales-from-the-aether-ttrpg]

Something ive noticed about a lot of people who play dnd (myself included) is that… they arent really playing dnd.

I don’t mean that in the - they’ve homebrewed the system to the point where they are basically playing a completely different game. i mean it in the way that dnd is less of a game and more of a tool or frame work to tell improve stories with friends. Thats why so many tables have a significant amount of homebrew rules or play it loose with the rules - because dnd is secondary to the act of telling a story.

Unfortunately, dnd wasn’t built for such a narratively focused sandbox. It was built around dungeons and adventuring and violence in general - an aspect that is only a fraction of many stories that dnd is used to tell.

I think that is why so many people are resistant from trying other ttrpg systems that may give them a better player experience. They dont play dnd to play dnd but they dont even realize that. The game is secondary so why does it matter what game they play? Everyone at their table is already versed in dnd so they can make it work as a framework even if its trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

This is something ive been thinking about a lot while making my ttrpg Tales from the Aether as I am inspecting my own view and experience with dnd and what i enjoy about it versus what could be done better. Why do me and my friends play dnd? To hang out and tell stories. Dnd happens to be the system i knew at the time we started and thus it is the one we used. But there is nothing particular about dnd that supports this goal while there are many things that hold us back - such as characters archetypes and classes being so ridged and having practically zero guidance for running the game outside of combat or adventuring. This is where homebrew comes in.

Ironically thats the entire premise of Tales from the Aether. I started making it years ago with the idea that this system is specifically a framework for people to tell improve stories with friends. That is the whole point. All of the mechanics revolve around giving players the tools to do what they want while the rules act more as a form of in universe world building (like a hard magic system) than actual rules.

The reason why so many people who play dnd are hesitant or straight up refuse to try out other ttrpgs is because the game is secondary. Its a tool. Its a framework that they can build off of to create the experience that they want. Its familiar so they know how to bend it, what parts to chip off or expand, to give them what they want. A new ttrpg, even if its one that gives them everything they want in a ttrpg, is unfamiliar and thus not worth investing in when they already have something that works well enough.

Idk i may be way off base here but from my own experience and from watching live plays and reading people’s takes on dnd and playing the game… thats kinda the conclusion ive come to.

[open-sketchbook]

MY NEXT TTRPG: Must be Tuesday 2nd Edition!

On October 31st this year, I'm gonna be putting out the preliminary edition of my next TTRPG, Must be Tuesday: Revived Edition! This version will be rules and text complete, but may or may not have all the art just yet (the PDF will be updated for free when the art's finished, then the final version will be available in print).

In this d6 driven, lightweight roleplaying game, you play as teenagers who are monsters (but I repeat myself) struggling to be normal through all the stresses of being a teenage monster-fighters, carefully balancing the two halves of your being so you don't end up the Monster of the Week or the Victim of the Week.

The game is very lightweight and makes for an excellent first RPG, designed for rotating GMs and short-to-medium length campaign 'seasons'. It has rules covering magic, artifacts, relationships, and baddies, all plugging into a simple system of dice pools, keyword talents, and a slider between squishy, well-adjusted mortal and terrifying, evil monster you need to walk.

It's basically an RPG that simulates Buffy seasons 1-3 in an easy to pick up and learn format, with a lot of guidance for GMs, a ready-to-use setting if you need it, twenty-five pairs of premade students and monsters, and additional campaign inspiration.

It's also a remake of my first ever published game, ten years on, as an excuse to redo old rules, redraw old art, and give it a fun new layout. It's the same game, just much, much better.

A notable expansion is splitting player characters across three kinds of monster Natures, each interacting differently with the game's mechanics to create different play incentives. There's the classic Selfish monster who shifts by fulfilling the desires of each half, the spiralling Self-Destructive monster who can keep sacrificing to stay in a fight, and the unstable Impulsive monster that swings wildly and easily between extremes. We even added more detailed support for playing regular humans, complete with their own dedicated Nature.

The game will be available on the 31st on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io!

[rollforfelicity]

Why Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Didn't Use D&D Combat Rules (And Why They Were Right Not To)

The D&D movie was really fun, and since at this point most of my friends play D&D (or at the very least other TTRPGs), almost everyone I talk to on a regular basis has also seen it and liked it. The consensus is that even though there's no "meta" that the characters are controlled by players sitting around a table, or jokes about the DM, the movie feels like D&D. The jokes feel like jokes people would make while playing. The constant pivoting from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C feels familiar to anyone who has spent an hour at a table deciding what to do, only to have a roll go sideways and screw things up. Before I get too far, I should say this post contains some mild spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

What didn't feel like D&D were the fight scenes. In one scene, a Paladin quickly dispatches a group of enemies before any of the rest of the party even acts, showcasing that even though he's kind of a square, he's an incredible fighter. In another scene, the Barbarian grabs and wears a helmet in the middle of a fight, using it creatively to get the upper hand. During a fight against a gargoyle, the Bard blinds an enemy by throwing a blanket over their head, but gets pulled along with them when a loose rope wraps around his leg. These are all pretty big moments in the movie, and Rules as Written, would never happen at a D&D table, because D&D combat doesn't work like that.

Here's what I think is interesting. The vast majority of the rules of D&D revolve around combat. It's not all of the rules, but most class abilities, spells, items, and rules have a combat focus. So why does a movie that functions partially as advertisement for the game spend so little effort to replicate the bulk of the content of the base game?

In my opinion, it's because, Rules As Written (or RAW), combat in D&D is not, generally speaking, narratively satisfying. Let's look at a few reasons why.

D&D is a game where, RAW, things either happen, or they don't. If someone misses an attack, nothing happens. If someone misses a skill check, nothing happens. DMs can work with this, but in the base game, there isn't a lot of guidance for what to do when a player fails at something they're trying to do. This may seem trivial, but compare that to something like Powered By The Apocalypse, which is much more narratively focused. In those games, a full miss means the Game Master changes things up. The enemy gets the upper hand. A new danger surfaces. An NPC is put into peril. Not only does the player fail at what they're trying to do, but something else, bad for the Player Character (PC) but good for the story, happens. On a mixed success, the PC might get what they're after, but at a cost, or with a complication they weren't expecting.

This calls to mind the example of the Bard throwing a tarp over the gargoyle in the final fight of the D&D movie. That's a classic example of a mixed success. He succeeds at temporarily blinding the creature, but in the process, he gets caught up in the gargoyle's rope and is dragged along for a ride. This is a dynamic thing to happen in combat, but wouldn't happen in actual D&D. Instead, a PC would either succeed at what they're doing, and blind the creature, or fail and not blind them. You could argue that the Bard's action was the result of a Natural 1, but that also doesn't fit RAW, because the Bard does succeed as what he's trying to do, and with a Natural 1, he would have failed and been pulled along.

D&D doesn't really reward player creativity. Something like throwing a tarp over a creature wouldn't be likely to happen in a session at all, because in the actual game, it would take a full action to do that, and depending on the Difficulty Challenge (DC) the DM sets, there's a good chance of a wasted turn. Creative actions end up a huge gamble, and when you're playing a game where it could be 20+ minutes before you get to take another turn (more like an hour if you're playing with a Wizard, amirite), you're disincentivized from "wasting" your turn to do something less than optimal. You can describe what you're doing to add to the narrative, whether you succeed or fail, but that brings me to my next point.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this question from Rise Up Comus since I read it a month ago. In D&D, a player can describe all kinds of flavor to what they're doing, and there's no change to the mechanics of the game. You could read this as saying "Oh, well that means you have the freedom to do what you want!" but if you look at game design through the lens of "what kind of play does this game encourage or discourage" the takeaway I have is that description just...doesn't matter to D&D. In my experience, that can lead to a few different unsatisfactory outcomes.

Both players and DM treat combat as purely rolling, and describing only what is required. A DM announces, "The enemy wizard casts fireball, roll dexterity save, take 25 damage. Turn passes to the Rogue." Sometimes players who describe what they're doing are seen as showboating or taking up too much time. Worst case scenario, the DM penalizes descriptive players.

Some players like describing what they do, others don't. This has no mechanical effect on the game. Players who aren't descriptive might be frustrated that an already slow process is slowed down even more. Descriptive players may become frustrated because there's no mechanical benefit to what they're describing, and spend time fruitlessly arguing with the DM that focusing on a weak point of the enemy should give them advantage. I think most tables fall into this category. It's not a bad game by any means, but not everyone is there for the same reason when it comes to combat.

Rule of Cool Table! Everyone describes whatever they want, the dice rolls don't really matter! Combat is generally pretty easy because fuck the rules, if it's cool for the dragon to die based on how the fighter described the attack, even if it's only the first round of combat, hell yeah let's do it! For players who like being more strategic and enjoy the confines of the rule structure because it makes things challenging, these tables can be frustrating. (If you're familiar with Dungeons & Daddies, this is essentially how they play D&D).

Because there's no guideline in the rules, people come to the table with different expectations. Some people want combat to feel like a strategy game, where following the rules in the most optimal way (or combining rules elements in an unexpected way) is mechanically rewarding (usually measured by damage output). Some people want to describe themselves doing cool stuff! Some people don't care about their characters looking cool, but want the story to be compelling. If everyone isn't on the same page, this can lead to players ending combat feeling unfulfilled, and when combat is the bulk of a rules set, it feels strange to me that there's no guidance for DMs or players as to how to incentivize the kind of combat your table is interested in.

This leads to a situation where combat in D&D is the part of D&D that takes the longest, that the majority of spells and abilities are focused on, but it is, narratively, the least satisfying part of the game, unless the table alters the base rules significantly.

If you're not familiar with other TTRPGs, you might be thinking "Okay, but that's why the DM is allowed to do whatever they want and make up new rules! My DM gives inspiration when we describe something cool, that solves this problem!" My critique isn't necessarily of individual tables. DMs and players come up with all kinds of mechanics that aren't in the rules. My critique is that D&D is a role-playing game that essentially has no incentives, and many disincentives, for role-playing during combat. For example, RAW, characters don't really have time to communicate during their turns, as each round takes about 6 seconds. There's no time for banter or negotiation between PCs and enemies. You can see this disconnect by the way people talk about D&D. How many times have you heard people say "I love D&D but I don't like combat?" How could this rift be rectified? Let's take a look at some other TTRPGs.

In 7th Sea, if you take the time to describe how your character is doing something, you get a bonus to your dice pool. In Thirsty Sword Lesbians, when you get a mixed success on a Fight roll, you and your opponent are given narrative prompts to build tension (like flirt with or provoke your opponent). In Kids on Bikes, you can fail or succeed rolls by different number ranks, which determines how significant the successes or failures are. In Wanderhome, you get a token when you "take a moment to bask in the grandeur of the world, and describe it to the table." In Good Society, each player gets a "monologue token" which they can spend to prompt another player to deliver their Main Character's internal monologue. I just played a bad-action-movie-themed game called Action 12 Cinema, where players can boost a roll if they call out the song that would be playing during this scene of the movie, and get an even FURTHER boost if anyone at the table sings it.

Each of those game mechanics gives you an instant understanding into the mood of the game, and the kind of stories its built for you to tell. Even if you've never heard of any of those games, I bet, based on the title and the move, that you could hazard a guess as to what playing the game is like. Dungeons & Dragons certainly has rules that add to the lore of the game, and prompt you to create characters that act a certain way. But when it comes to combat, players and DMs are left to their own devices. Some may see that as a strength of the game, but I see it as a source for a lot of disappointing play experiences.

And it seems as though, at the very least, the writers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves thought the combat rules were narratively unsatisfying enough that they eschewed using any of them.

[taylorannnx]

Pricing My One-Page TTRPG: A Peek Behind The Curtain

I already tweeted this in thread form but I find this topic both helpful and interesting, so Tumblr you're getting it too!

You may be shocked to find a one page game priced at $4.95, so let me breakdown WHY this is. As a disclaimer, we are offering 50 and 100% discounts to make the game accessible to people with different levels of disposable income.

I didn’t have the money to pay people upfront for their work at a fair price, but I knew in my heart Chefs de Partie was a collaborative project. I chose royalty split because the whole team benefits the more sales there are, which aligns with my values of community and supporting my peers.

Math is not my strong suit, but luckily there is a blog post with a spreadsheet template by Lyla Fujiwara that helped me calculate how to do a royalty split. Find it here: https://jarofeyes.substack.com/p/money-and-collaboration-paying-people

Steps I took to choose a price:

1) Determine shares per job. PMing, layout, and editing are all intensive jobs that take more hours than writing (research, back -and-forth-ing, communication hours) so I gave them each 2 shares, and the writers 1 share each. 

2) Set a target number of sales. I chose 51 because for community content you get a best seller metal. Also if each contributor manages to convince 5-6 people (an achievable number) to buy the product we’ve hit the target number.

3) Look at minimum wage for each job. For writing, it should be $0.10/word. For copyediting, it’s $0.02/word. I didn’t take into account layout hourly rates at the time, which in retrospect is a mistake and I will rectify this going forward.

(I cover the math later though!)

4) Word limits. This was influenced by space on the page but also feasible pay. Recipes were capped at 100 words. All writers would be paid the same whether they were under or over and submissions that were over were cut down to 100 (+/-10%) for space and fairness.

5) MATH. If writers are paid $0.10/word with a target of 51 sales to fully pay them, they need to earn $0.20 per sale.

The math is the same for editing thanks to 2 shares and word count limits/contributor numbers.

My workings: Writer: 0.2/sale x 51 = 10.2/100= 0.10/word Editor: 0.4/sale x 51 = 20.4 /936 (final manuscript word count) = 0.02/word

Thanks to Lyla’s handy spreadsheet, I was able to figure out that pricing the game at $4.95 allows everyone to be paid fairly within 51 sales. And that number grows! With 100 sales, the writers and our Mari earn $0.20 and $0.04 per word!

Is it more expensive than average? Yes. But it’s fair, which was my goal.

This pricing, however, comes with two main failings. The first is not taking into account the cost for layout. If my layout artist spent 15 hours on layout, by 51 sales they’ve only earned $1 per hour spent. That’s not enough. (I have discussed this with them and rectified it privately.)

Secondly, I didn’t take into account my own wages for both project management and writing. The core rules are 260 words long. It’ll take 65 sales before I’ve earned $0.10/word for the writing alone. /11

I’ve put 12+ hours into management, from creating documentation to communication to marketing/promotion (writing this thread took 2+ hours and is technically promotion)

At my current rate it would take additional 1176 sales before I paid myself for 12 hours (1241 sales total)!

Games, even one-page ones, are EXPENSIVE to make. Is Chefs de Partie overpriced? No. It’s fairly priced (to the editorial team at least) considering we’re an indie team with no business backing. $4.95 feels like a lot for one page, but the hours put into it make it worth every penny.

[thydungeongal]

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

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

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

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

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

[soulmuppet]

Did you know you can get started with any of our core line games for FREE?!

Thats right £0, in this economy ?!?

We aim to design Quickstarts with a few things in mind:

Simple overview of the rules including character creation or premade characters.

An adventure! Its no good having the rules for a game with no guidance on how to get a group to the table and actually PLAYING.

BIG VIBES - truthfully we want to sell you on the full thing, we do that by showing you what the game has to offer in STYLE.

Ready to try one out?

Paint The Town Red: a sad gay vampire rpg of found family, boozy nights out and stinking hangovers.

Inevitable: A doomed arthurian western of cowboy knights trying (and failing) to save the world.

Orbital Blues: a lo-fi space western ttrpg of depressed outlaws trying to make ends meet in a hypercaptalist dustbowl americana far-future.

Best Left Buried: a gritty horror dungeoncrawl where characters suffer the consequences of their actions.

Gangs of Titan City: play as as desperate gutterscum and either dominate the underworld as crimelords or end up riddled with bullets.

[retrokid616]

also is giving guidance to each other there way of hot potato incase anyone fucks up

[level2janitor]

how to run an OSR game

a while back i made this post to help people who were interested in OSR games but didn't know where to start, explaining the general design philosophy and going over a bunch of different OSR rulesets you can run a game with. so this is a follow-up post about how to actually run these (especially bc not all of them have much actual GM guidance)

note this is a highly opinionated post and some people from the more meatgrinder-y end of the OSR might take issue with this. but this is advice that works extremely well for my games.

how to prep situations and not plots

this is good advice for most games but OSR especially because OSR gameplay is so driven by player scheming: don't ever include "and then the players will..." in your prep, because you do not know what the players will do.

if your prepped scenario hinges on the players taking a specific action or the whole thing falls apart, you're digging your own grave as the GM. trying to account for every action the players can take is a trap, because players are creative and clever and their options are only limited by their ideas. that's the game.

so "prep situations, not plots" has become popular advice in TTRPG communities, especially OSR circles. but how do you actually do that

the most important elements of prep you want to figure out are:

what do all the NPCs involved in this scenario want? what social levers (wants, fears, habits, allegiances, guilty pleasures, relationships) do they have that the players can pull?

what will happen if the PCs never interfere? what conflicts and schemes are brewing in the background?

what locations are there to explore? who and what is inside them, what dangers and treasures are inside?

the best prep is stuff you can't improvise, or stuff that's unsatisfying when improvised. you should probably know monster stats ahead of time, know the layout of dungeons, that sort of thing. elements relevant to challenging the players are important to prep.

stop rolling for everything

coming from nearly any other TTRPG to an OSR game, your instinct when a player says "i want to do X" is "okay, make an X roll" through a skill system or a pbta move or something.

if you do this in an OSR game, you run into problems.

player characters aren't very strong. they have single-digit hit points, few if any class abilities, and whether they're carrying a crowbar, a grappling hook, a lantern, etc. is as impactful as their choice of class.

this is because the game is about using your head more than using your character sheet - the sheet just lists tools to apply your creative thinking to. scheming and managing your resources is the game.

and this means if a player has a clever idea, you should almost never reward them with a die roll to see if they succeed. a skill check is just a random chance of failure. instead most actions should succeed or fail automatically.

here's a good checklist to determine whether something succeeds:

is it something a normal, untrained person could do? if yes, you succeed.

could a normal person do it with the right tools, training and/or time to work? if yes, you succeed if you have any of those things.

if you don't have any of those, you can't. find another approach or get ahold of those conditions for success.

die rolls are for resolving uncertainty and risk. picture a version of 5e where there are no ability checks, only saving throws - dice you roll when something's gone wrong and you're in danger.

which leads into the next point...

communicating information

one of the worst sins of roll-based task resolution is when it's used to determine perception. players making informed decisions is the heart of the game, and they can't do that without information.

give information freely. if your character could know it, they probably do. try to do this too much. never gate information behind a die roll, especially the PC's surroundings.

part of this is always informing the player what is at stake. if a player's in a dangerous enough situation that success comes down to a die roll, you must let them know that before they opt into making that roll, and what the consequences for failure are.

OSR games are about risk management, so tell your players what is at risk when they make those decisions.

entering combat

combat is one of the most dangerous things in an OSR game - it's unpredictable, lethal, and entering it is always a big decision.

if you're coming from a game like 5e, often your first instinct when an encounter occurs is, "roll initiative!" but this is a mistake. you always, even when combat is about to start, ask players for their approach. do they fight? flee? negotiate? surrender?

because combat is so risky, forcing players into it unprompted fundamentally changes the dynamic of your campaign. keep in mind, once combat starts, you don't get any input between rolling initiative and taking your turn. your fate is up to the dice - your tactics matter, sure, but they can't save you from losing initiative, being crit, and dying from bad luck.

if players willingly choose combat as their approach, they should know the risks and what they're getting into. sometimes combat is the best way to achieve your goals, so it'll still happen.

[utilitycaster]

I think something important to remember in actual play is that character backstory is neither an itinerary for the GM to follow nor a to-do list for the player to check off, but rather a means to provide context for the character's motivations, how they got to where they are now, and how they will respond to whatever comes up. It's not a scripted work, so you can't just make a character follow a specific arc.

It's an extension of something I've said before, that creating characters outside the context of a specific D&D game has never really made sense to me because the GM's direction should be integral to your character creation. At best you can have a very loose concept that you drastically expand upon to fit a particular game. If you're about to play Curse of Strahd, for example, you aren't going to be exploring a complex personal history in Candlekeep. You can certainly be informed by a complex personal history in Candlekeep, and quite honestly should be informed by some kind of complex personal history somewhere! But in the game, you're going to be going into Barovia and dealing with Strahd. And you made a character based in Candlekeep because your GM said "we're playing in the Forgotten Realms". Your character is in that context as well: someone who'd have reason to go to Barovia, from the world in which Barovia exists.

Unsurprisingly, I'm talking about this because of Critical Role Campaign 3, and look, if I am wrong about what I say in this paragraph please feel free to bring up this post and say "you were wrong" but I just do not think this campaign is ever going to not be about the moon and the gods. I think there's ways it could have been about those things and still have had room for more downtime or personal excursions. I think that "pulpier and deadlier" wasn't wrong, but perhaps the cast could have benefited from more guidance in the same way that "this campaign is going to be spookier and deadlier" would not necessarily be a good way to tell your players that they're going to be playing Curse of Strahd, but it is what it is. That doesn't mean character backstories won't be explored (and honestly, I think they've all had at least a moment in the sun) but it isn't the focus, it's never really been the focus, and speaking only for myself that's been apparent for, at minimum, nearly 18 months.

It also doesn't mean you have to like it, nor that you can't complain. But there's always been hanging threads or unexplored elements. There's the obvious limitations of Pike's story given that Ashley was unable to be at the table much of the time, but we never really went deep into Scanlan's parents - and we didn't have to, because the purpose of Scanlan's mother being killed by goblins wasn't "we're going to avenge her"; it was to explain why he'd become a wandering bard and to inform how Sam played him. The Robert Sharpe plot for Jester never got much play because really, it was mostly as an establishing character moment and the reason why she left Nicodranas, not something that needed an extensive arc (nor something Laura seemed terribly interested in pursuing). We've never met Sabian or Tori; the twins never went back to Byroden during the campaign; Keyleth didn't find Vilya herself; Percy ended the campaign still with a lot of damage.

Which brings me to the final point which is that as anyone who's played a character-centric, GM-ed, longform advancement-style TTRPG should hopefully know, if there is a disconnect with what you as a player want to explore and with what your GM wants to play, and it's not in conflict with what was made clear from the start (ie, you didn't show up to the game the GM said would be Curse of Strahd and get mad that it was Curse of Strahd) it is the responsibility of the player to signal both in and out of game that this is something they want. If they don't, the GM will not know. But also, if you're wishing your favorite C3 character's backstory was explored in more depth, that character exists within the context of the moon plot. That is a part of who they are; they've grown around that plot and extricating them from it would necessarily destroy parts of them. You can tell a butterfly effect story, certainly, in which things were different, but that's ultimately fanfiction and neither a theory nor what should have happened nor is it an injustice to the character that it didn't happen. It's just what you wanted to have happened.