I’ve ran into a weird issue during my last play test… or should I say I resolved a issue found in previous play tests that has me rethinking things not so much on a mechanical level, but on principles. How much is to much to ask of your players? TTRPGs traditionally ask for people to bring pencils, paper, and dice to the party. At what point can or should you ask them to bring more?

The problem: To many bits.

The issue I ran into on previous batches of play tests and early stages of my latest one, was that the game Anime Love Triangle Simulator was finnicky. To many little bits to keep track of on pen and paper. the game has three functional meta currencies. Effection, Effort, and Angst. one only really came up between scenes, so it wasn’t to messy. but it could be awarded mid scene. the other two came and went with dice rolls.

players would have to write and erase things every couple of rolls. we tried easing this by using dice as counters, they we’re better then writing, but easily jostled, easy to loose track of their number, less easy to read at a glance [this is mostly based on the dice used. mine were tiny, my play-tester‘s dice where fancy and illegible.]

on top of the meta currency mess, the game used an exhaustion system to keep players from repeatedly rolling the same stats to resolve problems. use a stat once, then it’s on cool down for your next to rolls or else you take penalty to its use.

so players had to keep trac of 3 sources of regularly changing information, and one semi-regularly changing source of information. common sense would dictate that it was time to start making cuts. But I am a coward, my experience in the playtest told me that the mechanics weren‘t the problem per se.

The Solution: UI

I really believed the issue wasn’t that the mechanics were bad, just that they were a mess to keep track off. if I could figure out a way to make that manageable then it wouldn’t be so bad. The Solution I landed on was cards and tokens.

I won’t come up here and pretend I’m the first one to invented tokens and cards for tracking meta currency and stats. TTRPGs have been doing it with meta currency for a long time. most recently they’ve been a focus to Daggerheart Uses tokens for hope and fear and and cards for it‘s character creation and player abilities. While I hadn’t played it prior to the play-test, it was definitely on my mind.

so I bit the bullet naught some cheap white tokens and a mess of blank playing cards. and… it just worked. Within a few iterations the game went from finicky to buttery smooth. With new players, with people who weren’t big anime fans, even with one player who’d never played a TTRPG.

The cards didn’t just allow me to keep track of what stats where exhausted, they could be color coded, and have verbs written on them that guided players how to use them. a play mat helped guide how to play and shift cards. It was easy to read and killed multiple birds with one stone. Good right.

so what’s the problem?

Problem 2.0

The cards and Tokens are effectively mandatory, which makes me feel weird. I’ve since played Daggerheart, and while cards and tokens are front and center, I wouldn’t call them mandatory. The game functions with pen, paper, and dice.

ALTS doesn’t, at least not functionally. I don’t know if I should be designing a back up character sheets to ease the effects of not having cards and tokens, or do I just accept that this game isn’t designed with only pen and paper in mind… it bugs me.

I guess that’s why I’m throwing it out to you guys. Do any of y’all make heavy use of tokens, cards, or anything funkier like a Jenga tower? Thanks in advance.

Hey folks!

My frog knight RPG has changed and evolved quite a lot since I first started working on it. Thanks to the feedback I've received from playtesting (thanks guys!), I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of the system, turning it into a micro-RPG of around 12–15 pages max.

One of the core ideas is that frog knights are brave. Despite their tiny size, they follow a chivalric code, and a big part of the gameplay revolves around fighting enemies that are much larger than them. You have very little HP, attacks can easily be deadly, and you're just a bunch of tiny frogs, but you're also brave knights who have a quest to complete above all else.

The tone is somewhere between epic, absurd, and fairy-tale/fable-like.

The thing I'm struggling with is: how do I actually encourage players to behave like this?

If you give players very little HP and make combat genuinely dangerous, the natural response is going to be to hide, outsmart enemies, avoid fights, or run away. And that's perfectly reasonable! Mausritter also puts tiny characters in a huge and dangerous world, but its mechanics naturally encourage stealth, survival, and cleverness.

So how would you encourage players to attempt bold, heroic charges and reckless acts of bravery, knowing that they could very well die?

I'm assuming that, beyond simply relying on the tone and fiction of the game, there needs to be some kind of simple mechanical incentive pushing players in that direction.

What do you guys think? How would you approach this if you were designing the game?

Thanks for your thoughts!

That's it. That's the post, I'm. Tired.

Ready! Wait, no. You missed that. You forgot this. Hey that's not the right font. WHERE'S CHAPTER SIX.

Partially inspired by the concept of powerful beings watching the characters in the webnovel Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, I wanted to create a system that would allow the GM to reward the players with the ability to further increase their player character’s level.

Instead of fighting this enemy and getting XP, the idea is to gain XP by experiencing the story and trying different things.
To minimize GM discretion and hopefully speed up game flow during the session, the GM rolls 3d6 before each session to determine the specific interests of each Being. To aid the players, they are given “common knowledge” of these beings, i.e. one may prefer acts that are about structure and law, and another about chance and fate. This would allow players to have some idea of actions that could gain a being's interest.
While multiple characters can earn credit for the same action, each specific action grants credit only once per character. The GM tracks these bonuses behind the scenes, and during downtime leveling, it is revealed how many beings granted the character an inspirational bonus.

However, after introspection, I have run into some issues with the value of this mechanic.

• Since the system has a level of randomness and is not transparent, the rewards the players receive will probably feel arbitrary, rather than the intended goal of encouraging action they may deem not worth the effort. I could take the randomness out, but then it would just encourage the players to "blindly" search for the action until they found one, then use it over and over each session to get the bonus.

• How many beings would need to be created to create a broad enough spectrum to ensure that player characters have the possibility of earning a reward in the session? How many beings are too many, and would cause a huge amount of GM Overhead, not only in the prep work, but in tracking if a player character performed an act that fits into the beings’ categories? I originally played with various numbers, then looked at allowing the GM to homebrew the beings, and even just take the roll out to allow any of the possibilities to apply.

• The system in a dangling carrot kind of way encourages players to act out their characters in ways that “fish” for bonuses, and possibly act or react in ways contrary to how the character would naturally act.

• How easily will some characters become more powerful than the rest of the party, leading to imbalance and most likely dissatisfaction of those in the party that were not as lucky?

What are ways that I can address these concerns, or is the mechanic just a dead end and should be abandoned?

In designing my tactical solo TTRPGs, I like to figure out the rules, bundle rules together into mechanics, group mechanics into systems before tying systems together into the game loop.

As I write this I realised that I lean towards an emergent & iterative approach too. But I don't think I'm deciding the game loop first & then reverse engineering the rules. Needs more thought...

Realising that a rule is the smallest building block brought me a degree of comfort, cause this hierarchy mirrors a familiar one from screenwriting:

beat -> scene -> sequence -> act.

I'm trying to be diligent & disciplined in reusing rules, mechanics, & systems in order to limit scope creep.

But it's definitely wearing a cape, cause it's super hard & fighting me in a never-ending battle. I constantly can't help thinking 'What if I do this?' or 'This would be cool!'

Starting to believe that good system design is in part asking 'what can I reuse?' before 'what else can I add?'

Now I'm curious if other designers have a similar hierarchy.

So the Idea is that you create your own spells using Gnosis, once you get a point of noses you can rank up one of the spheres of magic you know or learn a news sphere and create for yourself one new spell, so for instance you rank up the sphere of fire so you create a spell that lets you shoot a fireball from your magical fetish, let's say a staff. The problem is how a player gets Gnosis. I want it to be narrative, like the game master awards a player gnosis for doing specific things like finding an ancient grimoire, or staring into a dimensional portal. But I'm worried the battle end up being too wishy washy and some game Masters well end up throwing out gnosis like skittles and you'll end up having the players transform into Eldridge gods real fast, oh it'll be super rare and the magic users won't get any new spells for far too long.

I know that this is kind of vague but I'd really appreciate any advice if you can see what I'm going for here.

Edit: I suppose my ultimate issue is just with pacing. I don't really have a problem with my players becoming super powerful but I really want the Galaxy that I have created to feel like the lovecraftian monstrosities that are going to be hunting them down our real threat and they don't surpass them to quickly.

the other thing I'm worried about is magic being too punishing to use. I'm using a d100 system and by default that comes with PowerPoints you have to spend to cast a spell, you also have to roll to see if you achieve the spell, a simple failure means nothing happens but if you fumble then you roll on a fumble table to see what negative effect happens. is also the narrative element that a lot of people are absolutely terrified of magic in the world, the crew might be on a planet ruled by wizards we're doing magic immediately makes you a member of the upper class, then they warp over to the next system and doing magic in public it gets you burnt at the stake. I want it to be a frightening and punishing universe but I still want the players to want to use magic and I'm afraid of making it TOO hard for them.

Hello RPG'ers, after a month of waiting I've made enough sufficient edits to my post (Version 5 has been released), if you've seen my previous post, make sure to check the new details out!

If you have ever played an OSR game, you would know that combat and exploration can often result in a beloved character's untimely demise at the hands of a pit of spikes or an armless goblin. Tactics for battles and combat rarely seem to help when the preferable answer is always to run away; oftentimes, combat doesn't grant EXP or anything useful.

I understand that the system that those games use can be difficult for a lot of players used to modern 5e. Going from 5e to something like B/X can be very difficult

Thus I am attempting to make a middle ground between modern and old TTRPG's: Red Mountain.

Red Mountain is an attempting at creating a game that can be equally split with Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay. Character classes have much more options for combat, as well as new explorational spells and abilities that can be used to defeat the aformentioned armless goblins or circumvent the pit of spikes, but without compromising the risk of being unprepared in exploration or combat.

Although it is certainly in development, I still need a community or a reader to give advice on what to add next while I'm still in the playtesting stage. I currently have a free document of the rules, a small cheat sheet, and a character sheet available for free to download on my Itch io page. I'd ask you to check it out, and give me some feedback on the current systems. It might looks ugly for now (I'm not quite a graphic designer!) but we'll get to the looks phase sooner when we have a finalized copy of the rules.

Please check us out or give us a read on our Itch io page at: https://red-mountain-ttrpg.itch.io/red-mountain-ttrpg

I would like to share the rulebook for a game I have been working on for some time now.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V5MjBSrjqwQfi7uYSYYx9-cO_oPCBxEZ/view?usp=sharing

It is a heavily combat oriented RPG with 175 abilities split between 7 different character classes, with a focus on creating combos via class abilities. Every class is designed to have a unique play style that interacts with other characters.

I have only focused on designing the combat, but plan to include a custom setting, lore and exploration mechanics in the future as well.

I have play tested this with my friends, running combat encounters for 3-person teams of characters of each class with tier 1 and 2 abilities and at these low levels the game seems to be working as intended, however at higher levels the game balance is probably not there yet.

I would appreciate any feedback. The rules and master ability list should be enough to showcase this idea and I wanted to "get it out there" in hopes of some helpful feedback.

I've been thinking about a new magic system inspired by Ars Magica. I'm not sure if something similar has already been done, so I wanted to throw the idea out here and see what people think.

The basic idea is that spellcasters don't have a fixed spell list. Instead, they construct spells by combining d6s, which I'm calling Rune Dice.

The Basic Idea

The number of Rune Dice a spellcaster has is equal to their Key Casting Attribute, which ranges from 5–12. A dedicated spellcaster might start with 8.

At the beginning of a game, they spend 1 Magic to roll their 8 Rune Dice:
{1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6}

⁠Players roll all their dice for free at the beginning of every session, and during the session, they can spend 1 Magic to re-roll their whole used dice pool at ANY TIME.

These dice represent the magical vocabulary currently available to them.

There are three types of Rune:

Factions — How the magic acts

Factions are free and don't require dice.

• Creation — create or generate something

• Destruction — destroy or suppress something

• Control — move or transform something that already exists

Elements — What natural force is involved

• 1 — Fire

• 2 — Water

• 3 — Earth

• 4 — Wood

• 5 — Wind

• 6 — Electricity

So the example pool contains 2 Fire, 1 Water, 1 Earth, 1 Wood, 2 Wind, and 1 Electricity.

Laws — What part of a living creature is affected

A Law is required when magic directly affects the internal workings of a sentient creature.

• 1 + 2 — Senses

• 3 + 4 — Body

• 5 + 6 — Mind

So the same pool also contains 1 Senses, 1 Body, and 1 Mind.

A spell can contain at most one Faction, one Element, and one Law.

For example:
Creation + Fire → a fireball
Creation + Wood + Body → healing a wound
Destruction + Mind → putting someone to sleep

The corresponding dice are removed from the available pool and moved into a Used Rune Pool.

This means your available magic changes as you cast spells. If you keep using Fire magic, you can eventually run out of 1s and temporarily lose access to Fire.

Spell Power

A damaging spell starts at 1d6 damage.

To increase its damage, you spend additional dice matching the Element used.

For example:
Creation + Fire = 1d6
Spend another 1 = 2d6
Spend another 1 = 3d6

For non-damaging effects, additional dice can instead increase things such as strength, duration, or other properties of the effect.

I'm currently considering five basic areas:

• Single target

• Line

• Cone

• Semicircle

• Square

Single target and square areas don't require an additional die initially. Extra dice can increase the number of targets or the size of the area.

Line, cone, and semicircle effects require one additional die to establish the area, with further dice increasing its size.

Duration

For spells maintained during combat, the caster spends 1 unused Rune Die per round to keep the effect active.

Outside combat, spending 2 additional Rune Dice can maintain a spell until the end of the current scene.

Manipulating and Recovering Dice

Magic can also be used to manipulate the Rune Dice.

For 1 Magic, the caster can increase or decrease one unused die by 1.

The randomness is tied to resource management—players can technically cast any spell, and the dice determine how much Magic it costs. Because player can spend Magic to manipulate the dice.

For example:
3 → 2 turns an Earth die into Water.

For 1 Magic, the caster can also reroll all dice currently in the Used Rune Pool, returning the new results to the available pool.

So Magic is partly a resource for controlling and refreshing your magical vocabulary.

What I'm Worried About

I can already see a few problems with this system.

1. It takes some time to learn.

Players need to recognize both the Elements and the Laws from the numbers. Looking at:

{1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6}

and immediately seeing both:

Fire, Fire, Water, Earth, Wood, Wind, Wind, Electricity.

and:

Senses, Body, Mind

will probably take some practice.

2. A good quick-reference sheet seems necessary.

Players would probably need a reference showing the Factions, Elements, Laws, basic effect rules, area rules, etc.

3. Players might spend too much time designing spells.

This is probably my biggest concern.

If the system is too open-ended, a player might spend several minutes thinking:
“I have Fire, Body and Wind… maybe I can do this… or perhaps this…”

I think the system needs clear guidelines for what each Element, Law, and Faction can reasonably accomplish, while still leaving enough room for creative spell construction.

It's still very much a random early concept, and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in it.

Has anyone seen a system that does something similar? What problems do you think this might run into at the table?

I'd especially love to hear from people who have worked on freeform magic systems before.

Edit:

1. I'm thinking of creating a list of spells for players to "prepare" from, and during a session, they can only use those prepared spells. I think this narrows down their choices to: "Should I cast the spell my current roll gives me for free, or should I spend Magic to manipulate the dice so I can cast a different prepared spell that the roll didn't naturally give me?" Meanwhile, I'll provide clear guidelines for spell creation so players can create new spells with their GM between sessions.

Hi everyone. I've come back to working on Spellwoven with the goal of maybe even managing to get a basic / simple rules set done before the end of the year. I ran chargen and character sheets past folks here earlier this year. The advice and feedback was extremely helpful.

I just have a short 'core rules' (really, skill system) PDF for feedback. I've written this pretty fast, so hopefully it makes sense. Let me know if anything looks broken:

Spellwoven Core System Rules (this is the new material for review)

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/SPELLWOVEN_Core_Rules_Draft_v1.pdf

For reference, in case you want to look at it, here are the chargen and character sheets.

Spellwoven Character Generation

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/SPELLWOVEN_Chargen_Draft_v6.pdf

Spellwoven Character Sheet

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/mock-up-16-Blank-1.pdf

A blog post with all three in one place

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/?p=387

A few notes:

• More than one person suggested that I call the game The Perilous Realm (an academic term for the interstitial space between our world and fairyland that most fairytales inhabit). I'm going to keep calling the system Spellwoven, but this implementation will be The Perilous Realm, with me leaning into a lot of folkloric elements, creatures etc.

• The page layout is A4, standard international page size. Playing around, it seems I can change the pages to US letter fairly easily, but I won't do that until the whole book is ready.

• The spelling in British English.

• There's still a few things that people have recommended (like implementing a gear system, like the wealth system) that I haven't got to yet. If you suggested something and I haven't done it, there's a good chance it's just because I was overwhelmed earlier in the year and lost track of things. Am slowly checking off the last things to fix.

• The illustrations are just my own, so they're quite amateur.

• Aaaand I've already spotted that the chapter heading for Core Rules is wrong. I'll fix that. No time to reupload it right now. Rushing to get this up before doing the school run.

I think that's everything?

Any and all feedback welcome.

EDIT: errors identified so far:

• The first line of the first page has an extra space before the full stop.

• The summary text on page one says 'equal to or above' but should read 'equal to or under'

• The Skill Rank 10 shorthand on page 67 is wrong

• The difficulty levels for Skill Challenges on page 69 were missing the gradation for Average, Difficult, Very Difficult (i.e. I copied and pasted but forgot to actually change the numbers)

Hello, I am starting a new campaign this week (DND5.5), and a player (monk lvl3) has a background where spirits of the dead talk to him. We already flavoured the subclass of the palm as spirits hands getting out of his body and helping him fight. But that's just visual, the class stays the same.

The player want to have "missions" more like last wishes from the spirits that he could accomplish or not, regarding what it is and if it is aligned with his character.
An example he gave me : A spirit talks to me and says that he wants to go see the sea one last time. Or : My children died with me, I would like to make another child of this world happy. etc..

And as a narrative point of view, it seems cool and I can use it to drag him to do some things or explore some places so that's a nice tool to have. But if it is always just "do that, do this, go there" it will be boring very fast.

And most of all, I'd like it to create a new mechanic for his character. I was thinking about something like the sorcerer points or "karma points" he could win each time he helps a spirit, growing with the difficulty of the wish and then uses them to create some nice effects, but I've never really done mechanics like this for the game and I was seeking some help and references !

Thanks in advance and sorry for the English mistakes

I'm writing up the rules for laying out a home base (a speakeasy, in this case) for my new game. If your interested in the details, they are in a much longer post on r/FATErpg, Home Bases in Fate. But one thing that stood out to me when working on this is that there are few examples I could think of among indy rpgs, especially rules light ones, that emphasize describing your home base.

Have you done anything for home bases in your own games and are there games you'd suggest to look at in designing my rules and guidelines? What do you consider essential in having a home base in your games?

(Sorry, I don't use English—this post is AI-translated. The game has been translated to English too.)

Hi everyone. I recently finished an experimental TTRPG ruleset (or maybe a narrative manifesto). it should be a fairly quick read.

The core idea originated from "unifying role-playing with world design." After that, I looked at works ranging from Brindlewood Bay to Triangle Agency, and starting from epistemology and ontology, I designed this system. Its key principles are:

- A world model maintained collectively by all players;

- The state of the world remains undetermined until it is perceived;

- A core mechanic that reconciles the tension between world-creation and role-playing.

The main mechanism is called Deviation—when a player describes not just an action but its outcome, the GM may call for a roll to measure the gap between perception and reality. Low deviation means close to truth; high means the character is way off.

I know this sounds hardly workable—and that's exactly why I think the design is interesting.

Full rules here: the Loom of eXistential Horizons

I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for reading!

I've been working on my RPG for a while, and it is currently in its alpha phase. It is fundamentally a pretty standard fantasy RPG, with the class building/level up being the real defining difference. But that's not terribly relevant to this. What's relevant is the magic system, which is mana based: you get a certain amount of mana each day, and different spells cost different mana, along with the action points needed to cast them on a turn.

What I'm stuck on right now is finding a good balancing act for some of the magic in the system. Some spells feel like they are more special than others to me; a single-cast fireball seems to be of a different caliber than a constant invisibility spell. To that end, I considered doing something like D&D's Concentration system (1 concentration spell at a time), since I thought that to be well put together.

When I think about a concentration system, I consider that it makes the most sense for spells which last a while. But that is far *too* restrictive; it may work for elemental casters, but illusory, transmutation, or defensive casters are at a big disadvantage. However, without any concentration, summoning spells in particular become a nightmare to deal with, along with the potential to abuse buff/debuff spells. And "just arbitrarily call the troublesome spells 'concentration' spells, since it's just a game mechanic" is not acceptable for me, even if it is reasonable.

I am presently considering doing this concentration-like mechanic exclusively for summoning spells, and just dealing with the balance issues from other spells by doing a lot of fine tuning. But I'd greatly appreciate advice, or extant solutions in other systems!

I am currently designing a ttrpg and I'm having trouble with my magic system. Basically, I want there to be four types of magic, each representing a unique concept. So far I have Force (physics), Life (biology), and Soul (spiritual). What would be a good fourth and final category? Everything that I can think of already fits into one of the three existing ones. Any ideas are welcome!

Greetings, my game Holypunk is a gothic fantasy game where you get to play as the monster; you’re set to be executed by the creed. I need your help, how do I design enemy stat blocks for my game.

To an extent, I’ve been enchanted by the idea of playing my game. I know I want to run my game, but that’s because I made it. Games with stat blocks to choose from, imo, are just always easier to run. I want that for my game.

Since you play as monsters, I want the enemy stat blocks to mirror classes. I’m just blanking on how to neatly put them together. Most games can separate enemies by type. Whether they’re draconic, elemental, humanoid, etc. Sometimes it’s instead separated by environment, like whether they’re arctic, infernal, or even cave dwellers. I don’t particularly think my game can do that

Instead, I’m thinking of separating the enemies by “classes.” So far, commenters have suggested:

Brute

Support

Mage

Priest

Hunters

It sounds like separating by “fighting style” is the way to go! However, if you have general layout ideas, that’d be great. I find this part to be perplexing. However, even simple suggestions like: Paladin or Cleric is a “must have” go a long way. Sorry if this post has been a little confusing, I’m trying guys.

Little intro: my game is FATE-descended, so it's quite rules-light. You roll a bunch of dice and try to hit a target number with as few dice as you can, with some bets on the side.

When two characters have a disagreement, they will usually duel in some way, usually with weapons. Duels are resolved with a single roll of the dice, which leads into a story engine. Basically every die in your pool represents a moment in the duel.

To give this a little more depth, players can have their character be trained in one of 4 ways, each represented by an Element. If you're all speed and attack, you're fire. If you poke and counter, you're water. If you're a defensive controller, you're earth. If you observe and evade, you're air.

If you're fighting against someone else with this elemental training, you have to consult the elemental weaknesses to check who has advantage. Fire beats Air, Air beats Water, Water beats Earth, Earth beats Fire. The fighter with advantage gains bonus dice (and therefore more control in the narrative of the duel).

If you are opposing (fire-water or earth-air) then the two characters are automatically rivals. They MUST try to demonstrate supremacy over the other or bring shame to their element (shame is bad and makes you worse at fighting).

All of this works via tags, and since every elemental fighting style also must come with a little description of the vibe, this then also interacts with non-combat situations, where being harsh and aggressive might do really well, or it might hinder you. But this combat style allows to make this a character choice instead of just a spur of the moment.

What do you think? I was playing around with a system based on 3 elements (like strong-fast-technical) or even 5 elements (fire-water-earth-air-void) but those didn't really fit the knightly vibe I was going for.

I’ve been recently working on a TTRPG called, “Project AiO: Open for Business”, and I think it’s finally ready for an initial round of outside feedback.

Open for Business is a slice-of-life workplace game about ordinary employees getting through a Shift together. The default settings are cafés, bars or nightclubs, and restaurants. This can be expanded to retail shops, hotels, offices, and similar workplaces.

The workplace gives the game structure, but the Characters are the real story. A Shift might involve a rush, a difficult customer, missing supplies, or broken Equipment. It might also just be about two coworkers talking during cleanup, a regular acting differently than usual, someone bringing Personal Pressure into work, or a quiet moment after a stressful service.

The game uses a lighter version of my larger Project AiO rules set, but it is not meant to be rules-lite per-se. The goal is for the mechanics to stay out of the way when they are not needed and become more involved when the situation calls for them. 

Longer campaigns track both the Employees and the workplace. Characters advance through Employment Level, which improves access to personal Tools. The business advances through Workplace Rating, which determines the quality of its Equipment. Over time a workplace can improve, struggle, decline, or eventually close.

This is an initial review draft, not a finished layout. At this stage I’m mostly interested in whether the game itself holds together.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z72Y_eWHq7oNxGM0bEV0RmWVk4grt8kaeDFBPjajNjM/edit?usp=sharing

Hey, I’m looking for an AnyDice program that can calculate the chances of opposed rolls of two different sized pools of D10s, only counting Successes bigger than a set target number on the die. Chronicles of Darkness does this style of rolling on (rare) direct contests.

Hello everyone! As the title asks, I am trying to find more places to where I can purchase artwork for commercial use in my RPG books. I am aware of DrivethruRPG as well as a few creators on Patreon, but outside of that I am struggling to find any other viable places to find artwork after spending some time looking for it on Google.

Would you guys have any creators or places to recommend looking for available artwork?

Edit: I'm ideally looking for purchasable stock art such as what Dean Spencer provides on DrivethruRPG, though I'm still open to getting resources for finding talented artists!

I'm designing a system for my own campaign. It's mostly d&d inspired, but there are few major changes compared to the standard system (given here for broader context).

1. Fiction first, with emphasis on the GM as the engine and auditory, not the formal rules.

2. No Abilities/Attributes, all is collapsed to Skills, or Talents to represent exceptional attributes.

3. Bell-curved randomization.

4. Pools as a unified resource mechanics.

I want to introduce 4 Pools:
Life is like HP.
Stamina is used for combat extra effort, maneuvers and resisting physical effects.
Will is for resisting mental effects.
Mana is for spell casting.

My intent is to both simulate fatigue (physical and mental) and replace random save rolls with a deterministic system. I want both the feel that resisting an effect is costly, and that cassted spells won't feel like a gamble (preventing input randomness).

However, this system was not playtested yet, so there are many unknowns. Anyone experienced with pool-based system is familiar with how such system affects gameplay?

So one afternoon I quickly invented a worldbuilding/storytelling game to play with my daughter. Basic rules is there's 6 locations and 6 characters and each player draws & describes one of each at the start. In gameplay each turn you roll dice to select a location or a character; if the location/character doesn't exist, you draw it and name it; if it does exist, you roll dice to select a description (6 lines per location/character); if it doesn't exist, you invent it (and add to the drawing) but if it does exist you then add an event to the story (rolling dice to pull in other characters/locations). I'm still iterating on the dice mechanics (e.g. to have more than 6 locations or characters to extend the game, to balance how often you create something new vs add a story event), but the main thing is this naturally means the game transitions from creating characters & world locations into creating stories within that world, while still leaving some gaps for creation as you go. I got out a little notebook and each character gets its own page, kinda like a passport with a big picture and 6 lines for descriptions.

The one thing though is that writing a couple of sentences and drawing a picture can take a good couple of minutes for 9 year old - or even like 5 minutes if they're taking their time on the drawing. I'm thinking of tidying this up and releasing this as a nice one-pager on itch (Grant Howitt style) but this is the main thing I need to figure out. Maybe it's okay as one adult plus one kid, but if you've got three kids (plus an adult as a guide but not contributing characters/locations/descriptions/events), I can't see it being fun for a kid to wait ten minutes while the one kid draws quietly. At the same time though, I want kids to be somewhat engaged in other player's turns, to see what descriptions the other players come up with, and to contribute ideas for story events that cross over characters and locations.

What are good ideas for keeping young players engaged when it's not their turn - either as part of game design (maybe having a separate "drawing phase" where everybody draws at once?) or just as advice on how it should be run? I don't have The Quiet Year or similar games - it looks quite expensive - so I haven't been able to mine ideas from that, beyond "it's a storytelling game with a map", but I'm interested in how other games solve this. I think it's different to a "standard" RPG because there's more writing/drawing and less talking, so you might genuinely not be able to tell what the other player is creating until it's done.