#whosebaby does game dev

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

to be expanded on: animal crossing vibes over the mountain horror hack where you have to keep the neighbors alive and uncorrupted for as long as possible, without telling them what's going on

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

writing exercise i have decided to start doing, since it's much easier for me to set writing goals based on sentences than on word counts: the 1d10 challenge. just roll 1d10 and write that many sentences on your WIP of choice for the day. if you feel like you're not tapped out afterward, but you don't want to keep going without a goal, roll 1d10 again. rinse and repeat until you decide you're done for today. you're welcome

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

OKAY. I finally managed to carve down an actually simplified version of the offline pocket edition I made for the excellent RPGSolo system. I definitely have more things in mind to expand on as options for players who want them, and this draft is Rough and near entirely unedited because I pounded it out in like half an hour during a migraine, oops, BUT! It should be fully functional as it is currently, and I hope people enjoy it as much as I have been.

(Also, if you like it I encourage you to go give the creator of the original site some support! This wouldn't exist without his work, and there's all kinds of neat extra tools and in-depth explanations to be found there and on the forums. Go check it out!)

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To play, you will need a d100 (percentile dice), a d10, and a Likelihood table. One is provided below, but you may substitute your own percentages if you want to tweak your chances.

• A way to record the events of your game and/or to keep track of bonuses and penalties is recommended, but not required.

RPGSolo runs on the Yes, And/No, But system.

• Yes, and...: Not only is the outcome successful, but it's better than you expected; you are even better off than you would have been from achieving what you meant to do. Situations you are observing turn out to have some extra good news involved, or you gain even more thorough insight than you were looking for at first.

• Yes: You achieve your goal.

• Yes, but...: You achieve your goal, but there's a hitch or it comes at a cost.

• No, but: You fail your goal, but not completely. If you are making an observation, the situation isn't great, but there's a silver lining.

• No: You fail your goal.

• No, and...: Not only is the outcome a failure, but it's even worse than you thought, and/or you're worse off than if you had left it alone.

The Likelihood of a given roll dictates how likely you are to receive one of the above six outcomes. Each Likelihood lists the corresponding results on a scale from 1 to 100.

• No matter the Likelihood you are rolling from, there will always be a chance no matter how small to roll each outcome. Almost Impossible has a tiny chance to roll 'Yes, and...' and Sure Thing has a tiny chance to roll 'No, and...'

Optionally: you may add modifiers to increase or decrease your chances in a given scenario. Your character might be a trained fighter; they might have a sprained ankle; they might have found a flashlight; they may have a bad reputation in town which makes interactions with the townsfolk more hostile.

• Each point on a modifier counts for +1 or -1 Likelihood. A +1 turns a 50/50 into a Somewhat Likely, a -3 turns a Likely into a Somewhat Unlikely, and so on.

• Some modifiers make a bigger difference than others. A friendly demeanor might add a +1 bonus to checks involving interactions with the surly townsfolk, where that sprained ankle might be a -3 penalty to attempts to move quickly.

• Optionally: you may also add modifiers to change the outcome of a roll, not the Likelihood; a 'No, but...' becomes a 'Yes, but...' for example. These have a much stronger influence on your game, and you may want to use them sparingly.

• You may assign modifiers to your player characters--or other characters, or locations, or anything else--ahead of time, or you may add or remove modifiers during play as you feel they are appropriate.

At the beginning of each turn, decide what action you want to take, what observations you want to make, or what happens in the world around you.

Roll 1d10 to determine the difficulty of an action.

• 1: Almost Impossible

• 2: Very Unlikely

• 3: Unlikely

• 4: Somewhat Unlikely

• 5: 50/50

• 6: Somewhat Likely

• 7: Likely

• 8: Very Likely

• 9: Sure Thing

• 10: Reroll with +1 bonus (or just reroll, if you'd rather)

Add any appropriate modifiers to determine the Likelihood of the roll.

If you check the Likelihood of a roll and don't like your chances, you can choose not to pursue it.

• If there are any rolls you might want to come back to and try again later, you may want to make a note of it on the side. You might decide to leave a door with an alarm alone until you can find some tools to disarm it with, for example.

If you decide to proceed, roll 1d100 and consult the appropriate Likelihood table.

Add any appropriate outcome modifiers to determine the result.

Decide how to interpret the result.

• In case of wording you're not sure of ('do the guards notice me?' for example), a lower outcome is generally negative. You may want to write out the translated result next to the 'yes, and/no, but' result, for the sake of clarity.

• If you're rolling to decide between multiple options instead of for negative/positive outcomes, you may use your d10 as a yes/no oracle, or use 'yes, and/no, but' to roll for the degree to which the result falls between the presented options.

• Oracle between 2 options:

• 1-5: No/First option

• 6-10: Yes/Second option

• Oracle between 3 options:

• 1-3: No/First Option

• 4-6: Neither/Both/In-Between/Second option

• 7-9: Yes/Third option

• 10: Reroll, or secret fourth option

If you want to make more than one roll to determine what's going on before you continue the narrative, feel free to make as many in a row as you want before you describe what happens.

Optionally: you can use a Do-Over to redo a roll, or directly choose your outcome, if you really don't want to continue with what you got.

• It's recommended that you limit the number of these you have access to, if you want to keep some challenge in your game (5 Do-Overs per scene, for example), but you don't have to. You can do it as many times as you want; it comes down to what's most fun for you.

Write out what happens as a result of the outcome you rolled, until you reach the next point where you want the dice to show you the way.

Happy roleplaying!

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Likelihood Table

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Almost Impossible/Sure Thing:

-No, and...: 30% (1-30) [...] 1% (1)

-No: 50% (31-80) [...] 3% (2-4)

-No, but...: 11% (81-91) [...] 5% (5-9)

-Yes, but...: 5% (92-96) [...] 11% (11-19)

-Yes: 3% (97-99) [...] 50% (20-69)

-Yes, and: 1% (100) [...] 30% (70-100)

Very Unlikely/Very Likely:

-No, and...: 20% (1-20) [...] 3% (1-3)

-No: 40% (21-60) [...] 5% (4-8)

-No, but...: 20% (61-80) [...] 12% (9-20)

-Yes, but...: 12% (81-92) [...] 20% (21-40)

-Yes: 5% (93-97) [...] 40% (41-80)

-Yes, and...: 3% (98-100) [...] 20% (81-100)

Unlikely/Likely:

-No, and...: 15% (1-10) [...] 5% (1-5)

-No: 30% (11-50) [...] 10% (6-15)

-No, but...: 20% (51-70) [...] 20% (16-35)

-Yes, but...: 20% (71-85 [...] 20% (36-55)

-Yes: 10% (85-95) [...] 30% (56-85)

-Yes, and...: 5% (96-100) [...] 15% (86-100)

Somewhat Unlikely/Somewhat Likely:

-No, and...: 10% (1-10) [...] 10% (1-10)

-No: 30% (11-40) [...] 20% (11-30)

-No, but...: 20% (41-60) [...] 10% (31-40)

-Yes, but...: 10% (61-70) [...] 20% (41-60)

-Yes: 20% (71-90) [...] 30% (61-90)

-Yes, and...: 10% (91-100) [...] 10% (91-100)

50/50:

No, and...: 10% (1-10)

No: 20% (11-30)

No, but...: 20% (31-50)

Yes, but...: 20% (51-70)

Yes: 20% (71-90)

Yes, and...: 10% (91-100)

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

hey there, LL fandom!

first off i have been gone for a while, whoops, hello

second, i have been on a huge tabletop dev kick lately, and i am considering whipping up something for lorien legacies! i'm not sure yet how much of it would be its own system vs how much of it would be a supplement for an existing, larger game, but LL has some worldbuilding that i think would adapt really well to RPG format and i thought it'd be neat to give it a shot.

right now the main things i'm planning on adapting in some form are:

legacies, Of Course

charms

the Goop, especially augments and vatborn

chimæra

garde vs non-garde

species (where relevant and appropriate)

whatever is going on with the entity, the spark, and how they relate to different planets' alive-or-dead status

staying undercover vs strategically revealing information

establishing bases, resources, and backup vs being ready to make a clean getaway

guidelines for making/tweaking new legacies, charms, etc while keeping them balanced and fun, as well as leaving room for people to use their own interpretations of the worldbuilding

And So On

it might take me a while to get around to it, and it might turn into a Huge Complex Thing of Its Own, or might just be good for some flavoring and small mechanical twists added on to an existing game. but i think it'd be a lot of fun to work on, and if anyone has suggestions for systems you think it might work well with or other things from the books to adapt, feel free to weigh in!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

me: i'm feeling Itchy to write some solo stuff, but i'm also having trouble with feeling gummed up by mechanics from a bunch of different systems i'm tempted to start all at once. i think i'll get out my RPGSolo hack again, i just came up with a good simple way to handle a couple things like multiple-choice questions and points of interest and i could use something loose. it'll probably be brief and bare-bones, but hopefully there'll be enough guidance to keep me from running out of steam

me: immediately writes a full 1K-word first scene for a completely new story i pulled out of my ass, am hooked in and already have Ideas forming

me: well damn

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

wheezes i made. a game! a functioning playable game that i've had a lot of fun playtesting so far! sat down and made the core rules in one session yesterday, wrote up another few chunks for guiding/prompting the roleplay part this morning. and i have a bunch of variants drafting and those are definitely still in the works lmao, but the rules as they are are 100% playable and i am extremely proud of having gotten them down this fast.

there is definitely going to be further drafting etc, and i'm hoping to be able to format it with an actual graphical layout at some point. and also make like an actual proper intro post for it instead of just dropping it hot on my blog for whoever happens to be following me. in the meantime though here you go, if anyone decides to try it out have fun and i'd love to hear how that goes. enjoy!

[cws: horror, mentions of death, gore, and injury, possible themes of stalking. it's a game where you're being hunted down and have to prepare for what happens when you can't run anymore, so it has the potential to get real dark depending on how you play it lmao]

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Core Rules

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Guiding the Fiction

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(this section is probably a lot less coherent and has more repetition going on than i'd like, definitely is going to need a redraft or two, but i think it gets the mechanics across in a usable way as-is. meant to get further into the last set of examples, but i had to catch myself before i got carried away and ended up just filling out a d100 table. that'd be fun to do at some point but not by dropping it in the middle of the rulebook lmao)

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and that's the game so far! if anyone reads these and finds any specific bits to be confusing, please feel free to ask questions; i want to do my best to make sure my games fit together and are as clear as possible, with or without graphical gamebook format for visual aid, so fresh eyes are always welcome. in the meantime thank you for your time, and should you check it out may you have fun being chased by a Funny Little Guy

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

So I've been trying for a long time to figure out a good, simple way to substitute dice for a deck of playing cards. I made this primarily for the sake of accessibility--I am disabled in such a way that I can't use physical cards, and it is much, much harder to find good offline digital card decks than dice rollers--but I'm hoping it will also be useful for people who don't have playing cards on hand or space to use them.

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You will need:

A d10 and d6.

Preferably a way to record which cards you've drawn to which pile.

How to draw a card:

You will be rolling from 1 of 9 tables; the d10 is your table die, and the d6 is your result die. If you roll a 10 on the table die, reroll.

If playing without jokers, reroll on a 5-6 result from Table 9. If playing with jokers, roll normally.

The default order of suits is Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs, though you may change this if you want.

The order of numbered cards is Ace to King for each suit, followed by the black joker and red joker.

Roll 1d10 and 1d6.

Table 1:

1: Ace of Spades

2: 2 of Spades

3: 3 of Spades

4: 4 of Spades

5: 5 of Spades

6: 6 of Spades

Table 2:

1: 7 of Spades

2: 8 of Spades

3: 9 of Spades

4: 10 of Spades

5: Jack of Spades

6: Queen of Spades

Table 3:

1: King of Spades

2: Ace of Hearts

3: 2 of Hearts

4: 3 of Hearts

5: 4 of Hearts

6: 5 of Hearts

Table 4:

1: 6 of Hearts

2: 7 of Hearts

3: 8 of Hearts

4: 9 of Hearts

5: 10 of Hearts

6: Jack of Hearts

Table 5:

1: Queen of Hearts

2: King of Hearts

3: Ace of Diamonds

4: 2 of Diamonds

5: 3 of Diamonds

6: 4 of Diamonds

Table 6:

1: 5 of Diamonds

2: 6 of Diamonds

3: 7 of Diamonds

4: 8 of Diamonds

5: 9 of Diamonds

6: 10 of Diamonds

Table 7:

1: Jack of Diamonds

2: Queen of Diamonds

3: King of Diamonds

4: Ace of Clubs

5: 2 of Clubs

6: 3 of Clubs

Table 8:

1: 4 of Clubs

2: 5 of Clubs

3: 6 of Clubs

4: 7 of Clubs

5: 8 of Clubs

6: 9 of Clubs

Table 9:

1: 10 of Clubs

2: Jack of Clubs

3: Queen of Clubs

4: King of Clubs

5: Black Joker

6: Red Joker

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Methods to efficiently keep track of a deck are another story, and will be one of my next projects, but for now have this in case it's helpful to you. Enjoy!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

brain is half soup and half eating itself. pokes cautiously at some of my closer-to-being-done solo rpg systems/hacks

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

god i need to finish up that pokemon polyhedral hack, i left it to cook for a good long while and have gotten a lot of restructuring done recently that i think works a lot better. it does still need some work though, i had a lot of fun with even just the early versions of it and i'm excited to get to play a complete one

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

today on my When All You Have is a D10 project: Rolling a 6 with a D100.

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1-16: Option 1

17-32: Option 2

33-48: Option 3

49-64: Option 4

65-80: Option 5

81-96: Option 6

97-100: Reroll

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if you get that last one you can reroll the ones column, tens column, or both, up to you. tune in next time for so fucking help me i WILL find an efficient way to substitute dice for a deck of playing cards

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so i decided to check out The Lighthouse at the Edge of the Universe after seeing it mentioned around a few times, and a) it's Pretty Neat! b) because i am me it immediately gave me Ideas for hacks/tools/some possible refinement of an original system i've been rotating for a while. hell yeah

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

just got hit like a brick by the realization that i could like. post one of my solo campaigns on ao3, couldn't i. if they involve characters from any specific fandoms. like, i looked extensively through the guidelines and i'm not seeing it explicitly confirmed one way or the other, but also i can think of zero reason why it wouldn't be allowed? it's literally just fanfic written from prompts, only instead of a random word generator or whatever you're rolling dice now and then.

there are some systems i wouldn't do that with, like my hack of marchcrow's pokemon polyhedral that i've enjoyed and played quite a lot, because they're more repetitive quick-moving game loop than actual RP unless you go out of your way to add it in; it'd just feel spammy, technically allowed or not. but something like an RPGSolo or Over the Mountain campaign would i think be a hundred percent appropriate for ao3.

absolutely wild. i think i'm gonna do it.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

currently working on an OtM horror hack where you're having to protect your town from a Supernatural Miasma that's started to descend over it, and you have to do various things each in-game week/month/etc to keep it from getting worse; setting up defenses, building relationships, finding items, fighting off miasma encounters, clearing dungeons, and so on.

if you meet your base quota for miasma fought off by the end of each period, things stay as they are; if you meet an extra quota, they'll improve by one level; if you fail to meet your base quota, they get worse by one level. the higher your town's miasma level, the harder it is to keep locations, homes, and neighbors safe, the more unique and dangerous twists and events you're going to start seeing, and the more fucked up stuff is going to start happening in general. You Want to Keep Shit Under Control, is what i'm saying.

the thing is that it's supposed to be a horror hack. if you're playing the game with the sole aim, strategy-wise, of avoiding the horror elements as much as possible, that means that if you're doing well you're going to miss out on those horror elements when they're half the fun of the game.

a lot of horror games handle this by just making it nigh if not outright impossible to succeed at what you're doing, which is valid if people want to play that way, and there are some brilliant games that follow that design philosophy, but i think for a lot of people that just... isn't fun. failing over and over can be discouraging on its own regardless of other factors, and lack of player agency and ability to use skill to influence the outcome can leave people feeling like there's no actual point to playing. one person's poignant reflection on futility, tragedy, and struggle and perseverance for its own sake is another person's 'well fuck me for trying i guess, god damn.' there's a reason fromsoft games, fear and hunger, and super meat boy among others are (or were) wildly popular masterpieces while not by a long shot being for everyone.

other horror rpgs handle this by making success a lot more feasible--with or without strategy or skill--with the caveat that no matter what you do you will be deep in the horror, it's just a matter of whether you make it out alive. those are a ton of fun and tend to be a lot more up my alley, but that approach doesn't work super well for a game where, again, success means avoiding the horror elements. and even moreso when successes in those games tend to solely involve ramping up the risks, when a lot of the successes the player is aiming for in this hack mitigate the risks.

depending on how the balancing works out and what the player chooses, you might end up with a town that self-sustains at the minimum level of miasma with very little effort on your part. you're left without any real reason to dip back into the horror elements except 'ehhh might as well just not bother with actually, y'know, playing the game until things have gone to shit enough to be interesting. 🤷‍♂️' which might be fun for some people, but others... not so much. especially when that method involves actively distancing yourself from engaging with the game. i want to encourage players to interact and have fun, not make them sit back and disconnect.

so.... hm. right now i'm thinking i'm going to try to encourage getting into the horror elements of this hack by:

option to raise the difficulty, so the player can experience higher levels of miasma through plain old success or failure.

gain certain advantages by intentionally increasing the town's miasma.

certain quests, events, equipment, dungeons, and so on can only be found at certain levels of miasma; possibly neighbors who you've failed to protect might have to be rescued from the level they're lost in before you can get them back.

anyway i've been having a lot of fun with this hack so far, and it's been giving me a lot of things to consider. watch this space etc

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

fun way to combat power creep when a PC has reached the level where they should be able to just breeze through every roll--or at least every roll related to their specialties--for any obstacle that isn't increasingly overpowered to match: drop a couple of mines in there.

you still have to beat an 18, but now you also have a chance of failing automatically if you roll, say, an 8. you can raise or lower the difficulty of the roll by adding in more mines, and give players the opportunity to remove them if you want--keywords if you want; it leaves you the option to keep some rolls from being canceled out by PCs gathering up enough of the right abilities, and ending up right back where you started. but as long as you don't mind wanting to flip a table when your +5 bonus lands you directly on the losing number, it seems like a good way to keep some tension in the game without having to do major rehauls for just, like, the basics of how stats and leveling work in that system. it's a thought.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

Useful tool for journaling games when you're having trouble figuring out what to write for a scene, even with the help of tables and other prompts: choose and/or roll for a certain number of sentences. Whatever the events of the entry/turn you're rolling for, they'll need to fill up that number of sentences.

You can write them out in whatever format you want--as a summary, prose description, or alternating between them.

You can write a more fleshed-out version of the events you decide on if you want, as long as it can be summarized by the target number of sentences.

You can limit yourself to that specific number of sentences if you want the extra bit of challenge, or keep going if you feel like it once you've met the target.

You don't have to write the prompt sentences before you write out, or roll for, an extended version of the scene if you decide to do that. You can start with the opening situation and then add summarizing sentences for events as they play out, or you can summarize after the scene is finished.

You can choose different ranges if you want (recommended if you find yourself stumped a lot as to length you want to go for), or just use the same one every time. You might, say, choose or roll between a 5-sentence entry, a 10-sentence entry, a 20-sentence entry, and so on, or you might just treat each prompt as requiring 5 sentences. You can implement this as a table, or by rolling the appropriate die for the range you want to aim for.

You can choose set numbers for each range if you want to use more than one, or you can roll within a certain range. 1-sentence prompts might be an entirely separate result from 3-sentence prompts and 5-sentence prompts, or you might roll 1-5 when you get the associated range. (Or 3-5, for that matter.)

You can designate specific ranges to different circumstances. A 20-sentence description might be appropriate for, say, establishing a new location for the first time, but chances are good you're going to want to mostly stick to 1-5 each turn when you're in the middle of a fight.

A sentence isn't bound to any particular length, as long as something happens in it. You could write a sentence three words long, or make a huge run-on sentence full of as many semicolons and em-dashes and parentheses as you need to fit in what you want to say.

Length doesn't need to equal impact. A 20-sentence prompt might describe a chill conversation where you're getting to know a neighbor, where a 1-sentence prompt might be 'the king has been assassinated, and you're a prime suspect.' You may use a system or table of your choice to determine the nature of an entry, or choose whatever seems like fun.

In general, you're welcome to plug this into any game you like where it'll be helpful, and any particular part of that game! Descriptions, events, character bios, equipment, you name it.

I've found using sentences as quotas works a lot better for me in my writing than word counts, and word counts are even harder to use as a measure when you're, well... playing in a format where you can't easily just plug things into a word processor to check, or don't want to. Pen-and-paper journaling in particular would be a Nightmare, lord

(This is an observation of my own writing style, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've noticed my prose sentences average between 10-16 words. It might be a good idea to try and evaluate your own average so it's easier to get an idea in advance of How Much You're Going to Be Writing for a particular prompt.)

Anyway, figured I'd post this in case it's as helpful for someone else as it's been for me. Happy roleplaying!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

hmmm.... fun part of designing a solo game that involves some degree of dynamic generation is trying to give people some freedom to discover things as they go, so as to preserve some tension/mystery without overloading players with constant crunch, vs giving people the option for more pregenerated stuff without falling into Oddly Specific Tables and removing player personalization/replayability/tension. hm.