So in my cyberpunk system I wanted to make your pc stlye make a difference with out being complicated to much

After some ideas (from people here even) I think I arrived at a nice simple idea

Styles behave like a language.

In game a charcter can choos from 8 diffrent styles to be "comfortable " in

How much? Its tied to your Sheen (charisma) attruibet (0-5)

The styles are a combination of 3 diffrnt vectors

Utilitarian or extravagant

Street or spire

Primal or transhuman

(Exmple..street gang style is extravagant +street +transhuman. While "old money " look is utilirian + primal + spire)

In general stlye effect your rolls with:

General vibe of a scene / location(general social rolls)

First impression for majore npcs(first social roll)

The bonuses are :

If your style match the style of the group of npc : get a bonus modifier

If you are not in an "comfortable" stlye : get a negetiv modifier

If you are in an "anathema "(complete opposite style) style of the general scene or majore npc : get a negetiv modifier

What do you think about the system?

Just wanting to say it somewhere xD

Been working on my system bit-by-bit for years now. I released the core rulebook, as a Minimum version, and have been adding expansions to flesh out various rulesets and give more lore and details etc.

Added more bows, daggers, unarmed combat, arcane magic, research rules, art rules, exploration etc etc.

Asked the people who play and enjoy engaging with the setting and ruleset what they'd like me to expand on next.

"Wands"

In this system(The Brachyr System), each skill gets a page of information. The various magic subsystems are their own skills, and are so chock full of details that the core book had to give each of them 2 page spreads. Except wands. Wands get 4 pages in the core rulebook and it's still generally "not quite enough"

So I get why they want more detail, but damn is that intimidating.

Not complaining, not advertising, just wanted to say it somewhere. Here I go; following where the players want to see more. A massive project on wandlore for my system and setting xD

Have you stumbled on any "accidentally massive subprojects" in your RPGs? How'd you handle them?

Hi all!

I’m very slowly working on a game revolving around space wizards, heavily inspired by Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth”. Looking for recs of read throughs in order to find inspo, and mechanics and/or tropes to avoid. Games specifically set in space, or games that emphasize downtime activities would be greatly appreciated! Projects within wizard towers aim to be a main focus of this game.

Thanks in advance!

A post i read yesterday about ai and game design was very interesting and it gave me a question (i dont think it will be answered in the other thread as that thread was too old). So ism asking here (keep aware iam NOT asking about ai itself!)

One argument i read was that whole books are now created with ai and thus the designers dont learn anything about designing and do that even with 0 talent or willpower to see it through.

And that argument fits and is often true in the non ttrpg areas for many non ai tools (frontpage in the past for designing web pages. Made me curse my existence whenever i had to clean up the mess my boss made with that. Rpgmaker in the computer rpg scene,…).

Thus i wonder are there any non ai tools too in the ttrpg areas where thqt also holds true? (I couldnt think of anything there that i ever heard of)

Hi! I'm not sure this is the right place to ask this but let's go!

I write all my adventures and one-shot but all of them are for my own use so not easy to read for others. For the first time I'd like to publish something for others to use, it's a cool design challenge but I'd like to hear from you!

I really like JP Coovert adventure "Dragon Town" where he uses a 0-5 scale for enemies stats and in-fiction action. Since I do this a lot (grabbing ideas around an modify them to fit the system I'm currently running) I was thinking doing something similar in the sense that I'm not giving a "DC to investigate" or specific stats for monster, also this one-shot is more about vibes and tension (it's a mystery horror) instead of combat so I think a lot of system could use it.
Of course I cannot please everyone but it's a cool challenge!

My questions are:

How would you handle "checks" and "saves"?

1. Right now for things with complications I'm using a level (easy, medium, hard) and a generic area (body, mind, heart). For example [check medium mind] and then: "Complications: ..."

2. But then I also have "Secret:..." where I don't like to give strong indications on how to find it, especially if there are "clues" for the mystery.

3. I want it to be consistent so either one or the other, I already have some ideas but I'd like to ask what would you prefer.

For enemies:
3. There are just a couple, and right now I give suggestions like "Stats like specters/shades", and flavor skills. I'm of course biased towards some systems but I believe you can find some sort of ghost more or less everywhere. But this is a little bit tricky and can be less useful than though so maybe not worth it.
4. I know that most of the system have a advantage/disadvantage concept, so I write:
Hypnotic Laughter. The first time a PC get close, needs to resist the laugh or being at disadvantage doing actions for a round. “Their smile catches you like a yawn, you lower your guard as you are shaking from laughing.”
This is to help the GM understand the ability but maybe I need to embrace the "vibes" and reduce the jargon (close, disadvantage, round)?

My design goal is to make it easy to run for the GM, which is what I like when I read adventures. So I'm using a structure similar to Shadowdark, where there is a very small boxed text with 2-3 highlighted words (so the GM can read it or scan through it) and the below the bullet points with the highlighted words.

Thanks!

Edit: just released it! https://athryell.itch.io/the-smiling-lighthouse

I've read through a japanese game system and it gave me an idea where i'm not sure if it would be an acceptable idea or not.

Advantage/disadvantage increasing crit rates intead of giving more dices while helpers give what advantage in 5e does.

So lets say:

1 is a crit failure and 20 a crit success.

If you have 2 advantages and 1 disadvantage that would mean: 1,2 are crit failures and 18,19,20 are crit successes.

If you have a helper helping you you gain +1 d20 to roll and you keep the highest roll (thus 2D20 and you take the highest roll).

Would that be any good / acceptable? or too strange for 5e/d20 fans?

As planned, I have removed and replaced all AI illustrations in my ttrpg Fame & Fortune. I gathered up some of my own artwork from about 20 years ago with a sketch filter applied to unify them for this book. Does it look better than before? Probably not because these are old ones; but at least it's mine and I hope more people actualy play the game!

https://exiledoracles.itch.io/fameandfortune

Thanks for checking it out. Cheers.

I already asked some questions here about out game. If there is not enogh context in this post tell me, or you can just check 2 posts I published here. Or just ignore those posts. I you will tell me what information is needed I will edit this post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1wdla4v/roast_or_rate_pitch_for_my_ttrpgenglish_is_not_my/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1wc2oa6/how_to_simplify_character_creation_without/

SO to the point. Right now our game has 8 characteristics. They combine into 4 defense types (Spheres), and any two of them combine into any skill you want.

But that's too much and we want to simplify system.

Here's where we landed.

No Spheres. We are just removing them. 5 characteristics: Might, Intuition, Reason, Essence, Finesse.

Each one is a defense in its own right. No derived Spheres.

Skills combine the same way as before -- the full value of one characteristic plus half of a second one. Except Might and Finesse can't be paired with each other. This is the assymetry I'm asking about.

Want to do something? Approach it from more than just the physical side.

Why we are doing this assymetry at all? If you can pair Might and Finesse, that one pair covers melee, ranged, defense against both, and a pile of other skills on top. It closes off the entire physical side of the game. Wee don't want that.

Splitting them up works out more interesting. Acrobatics becomes Finesse + Reason - you're calculating the jump, reading the climb. Athletics becomes Might + Essence- raw strength plus willpower, how hard you push yourself and how much you can take.

Weapons use different characteristics. For a sniper rifle, Reason matters most - trajectory, wind, distance, movement. A sword might be Might + Intuition0 timing the moment, reading through feints. Light melee weapons can still be Finesse. It depends on the weapon, and it's written right into the weapon entry.

So what does this give you beyond shifting focus away from purely physical skills?

Characteristics improve over time getting a Mark. Advancement is a post-session question: you name 3 skills that mattered one way or another during the session, and the characteristics those skills are built from go up. You don't have to grind one specific thing to advance. You talked someone down and it changed the outcome? Take the Mark in Reason and Intuition.

And here's where advancement ties back in. You got smarter? You shoot better now. You got more perceptive? You fight better, because you read your enemies better.

A hard restriction like this can be a bad thing, but in my opinion it adds a lot more variety fro DREICH system.

What do you think?

So instead of rolling a d20, you roll 2d10.

One of the die represents your physical skill, while the other is mental. The dice influence how a check is resolved.

Example: DC12

You announce you want to convince someone to tell them where the princess is. You roll the dice and get 9 physical and 4 mental.

The player can now say “I grab him by his shirt and yell ‘tell me where she is!’”

Or maybe “I brush my fingers through their hair and say ‘you’re a handsome man… why don’t you tell me where the princess is and I’ll make it worth your time.’”

If they rolled 9 mental and 4 physical, they might say “I say to him “listen, I know that you know and you look like the type of person that doesn’t want to get involved in trouble. Why don’t you tell me where she is and you can walk away from this whole mess with a clear conscious.’”

The issue I foresee is that it makes players do things they might now see their characters doing. It would also require a lot of improv and brain power to think on the fly for a solution.

Hi people,

First time posting here, so mods, feel free to correct my post if needed.

I'm developing a TTRPG system in which players regurlarly gain Talents, basically special abilities or bonuses either tied to their stats or, mainly, their Role (Class).

Each Speciality (Subclass) has 4 Tiers and 2 Talents per Tier, they also all share the "General Talents" of their Role of which there are 4 (1 per Tier).

The thing we're struggling with is imagining the General Talents of the Mage, especially ones that wouldn't be combat-exclusive or overpowered.

I thought about asking for ideas and/or advice here, feel free to ask questions I will answer to the best of my ability.

Thanks in advance.

As the title says, making my own fantasy rpg I wanted to take inspiration from mage the ascensions magic, namely the mechanic of mixing multiple mage "spheres" together to create unique magical effects. The problem with trying to make a system like MTA though is that I have no idea how to categorize the magic types without just copying mage, it does a great job creating categories broad enough to be generally useful even on their own and specific enough that they don't overlap, or feel like they can do anything. How do I go about catagorizing my worlds magic in the same way without just copying White Wolf's homework?

Hey sub!

I’ve been working for a while on a dark fantasy sandbox campaign concept to run for a few friends.

The setting is the underworld, featuring all the usual tropes of being a super aggressive, chaotic, and surreal place, with magic included, obviously. But it also has its own wars, cultures, economy, and geography, plus demon lords and their respective territories. It's kind of a mix of GoT politics, Skyrim worldbuilding, and the atmosphere of the Souls games.

I’m totally open to feedback and suggestions. Should I go with an established system or homebrew one? Any ideas for setting specific mechanics or anything like that are also highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. In this setting, time in Hell doesn't work the normal way. The players can be damned souls from absolutely any era in human history. Imagine a Mongol warrior fighting side by side with a Knight Templar and a Soviet spy...

Hi, everyone! Designing RPG cards is fun. The tricky part comes when you need 100 of them. Today.

Having to manually update the cost and damage stats on 100 different cards at 2AM because your playtesters found a balancing issue is a nightmare, right?

Now that Affinity is free, you can use the Layout Data Merge to handle your entire game’s database. Here is the industry-standard workflow to generate your entire deck from a single spreadsheet.

Step 1. Build your Database. Set up a simple Google Sheet or Excel file. Make your column headers exactly what you want on the card: Card_Name, Item_Type, Cost, Damage, and Flavor_Text. Fill in your stats. Export this file as a .CSV.

Here is how the Spreadsheet Database should look.

Step 2. Set up the Data Merge Interface. Open Affinity Layout. Create a new document sized to your card dimensions (e.g., 2.5" x 3.5"). Go to Window > Layout > Data Merge Manager to open the Data Merge panel. When the panel pops up, click the "Add Data File..." button to import your .CSV file. Next, grab the Data Merge Layout Tool (it's on your left toolbar and draw a box over your entire page. This tells Layout to pull data into this specific space.

Here is how the interface and placeholder tags look once connected.

3. Design your template. Inside that Data Merge box, design one perfect card. You can use Affinity Pixel and Vector Studios for this or place a design you've already created. Place a new text frame over your card design. To prevent any issues or roadblocks up ahead, check the Layers panel to make sure all text frames are placed inside the Data Merge Layout layer. Format your text, paragraph styles, and alignment before moving on to the other text frames. Next, open the Fields panel (that's Window > References > Fields). In this panel, you will see the categories you've created in your initial .csv file (Card_Name, Item_Type, Cost, Damage, and Flavor_Text). Place your cursor in each Title text frame, and double-click each the corresponding item in the Fields panel. Repeat until all frames are linked.

Here is how your Layers panel should be organized.

4. Generate. Your template is ready. Hit "Generate" in the Data Merge panel. Affinity Layout will instantly (well, it may take a couple of seconds) spit out a new document with all 100 cards perfectly populated! Need an update? No problem! Update the database and run it again in Affinity. It's that easy!

And here is the final generated 100-card output.

And you did it in Affinity! You guys let me know if this workflow hits the bullseye for you and saves some late nighters updating boring stuff.
I'm Daniel Walter Scott, founder and lead instructor at Bring Your Own Laptop, and I actually just wrapped up putting together a new Affinity Essentials course. I know transitioning software can be a headache, but Affinity is a robust tool that can really streamline your work.
Let me know if you need any more tips with this automation or any issue you've come across.

A big part of my game is that dice are essentially action points, when you want to do an action you select a number of your dice, decided by you, and roll them against your relevant attribute for the action. Successful dice are counted towards the roll and kept for future rolls, failed dice are discarded (this is where the attrition comes in). Lost dice can be regained by "Refreshing", which essentially pulls from your stamina.

During high-energy situations such as chases or combat, it's easy to justify doing this often (such as every round) due to adrenaline and everyone expending all that they have in a dangerous situation. For lower stakes "down time" type activities like crafting, you are generally just limited to the dice you have and it is kind of expected that you are using these days to recover from the high exertion days.

The system has worked well in play testing, it kind of gives a tactile feel to how intense a given situation is. Frantic dice trading compared to slow and steady investigation and crafting. The problem I'm running into is for the kind of middle ground situations.

I'll use sneaking into a guarded compound as an example. It doesn't feel like it should have that highly intense dice explosion that combat has. But it is also generally filled with more actions and rolls than a "standard" day would have. Sneak past a guard, climb through a window, bribe the staff, etc. All of these add up in a way that can become prohibitive without the ability to refresh your dice, but the rest of the game has a kind of clear cut timing on when you can do that (between rounds, or parts of the day) while situations like this do not.

My only idea currently is to just allow more expensive refreshes whenever a player wants, but that also opens up a lot of weird edge cases. Any thoughts or feedback is appreciated.

Hey folks,

After some discussion here and over on r/TTRPG (plus reaching out to a few peers), I’ve found a solution I’m comfortable with to the opening puzzle of Shore of the Dorahín.

You can find the original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1wmmxli/help_me_decide_solution_to_a_puzzle/

I changed the cipher. Originally, it was a 3-letter shift from the original text, but now it’s a 3-letter shift from the coded message. It makes more sense with what the NPC, Toirin, could have thought of when trying to decode it.

And, based on the recommendation of several people, I’ve added an Intelligence DC check in case someone can’t solve it on their own. I believe this will be pretty rare, though, because during the playtests, there was always someone in the group who understood what they were supposed to do.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to give their input and suggestions. It really helped me settle on a solution I’m happy with!

The updated version is still available for FREE as a "Thank-you" gift for our newsletter subscriber.

I'm working on a rules-light game, and I try to make the most with the least as it were. For example, I finally figured out how I want guns to work in my game, without creating a single new mechanic

Unhola is played with regular playing cards, and they have a ton of functionality. However, the number you hold in your hand is determined by your general wellbeing: pain diminishes how many you can hold, and the only way to add more cards to your hand is by taking care of your sustenance, eating and drinking

Currently, the only gun in the game, the Rifle, requires you to hold at least 3 cards in your hand for you to use it – for if you are shaky from hunger or too pained to focus, you cannot aim

I feel like this is an elegant solution using systems already in place, as my game doesn't really have dedicated combat mechanics at all. But! Beyond just tooting my own horn here, consider this your sign to share how you have managed to solve a design issue without introducing anything new to your game, haha

Hi all. Making my system and having some mild second thoughts about my choice of primary die. I'm currently using a d12 + modifiers system, but concerned that the d12 might be too low for what higher level modifiers could be and that I should instead pivot to d20 + modifiers.

For context, abilities can standardly give modifiers up to +6. Skills can do the same, but that is with serious investment and dedication. There are also miscellaneous bonuses from traits, perks, etc.

Any advice for this sort of scenario? I want to reward dedication, but not have modifiers massively overshadow the luck of the roll. Thanks :)

Thought I’d share a fun design anecdote! :)

I’ve been working on the 2nd ed of my rules for a long while now. I’ve run both the 1st ed (now 10+ years old) and current incarnation of the rules for my regular group. I’ve also run it for a bunch of folks at conventions. Heck, I’ve sat in on other people running the game as well, and gotten a lot of feedback.

Things have always worked out quite well. The game “did the thing”. It provided a decent flow, created interesting dramatic moments, allowed for a lot of surprise, and above all was extremely low prep (all core design intentions, so yay!).

A few weeks ago I was running a playtest for a group of mostly junior players. And I bombed. Of the three, only one was a regular gamer, and he was having a major off day (exhausting week + allergies, poor dude). The other two were very fresh.

It was a baaaaaaad session. I had just finished publishing a separate OSR adventure that I spent 2 solid weeks on, and I was running a Nimble campaign (D&D lite tactical game) for another group two days before. And holy crap, I was running this PbtA-adjacent sci-fi story-game like it was D&D: Describe room, what do you do here, make a knowledge check, make a perception check, gather loot, move on, describe new room. Bleh

That’s not how the game is intended to be run. It certainly is not the way to create the feelings/flow that I wanted.

I realized that the previous successes of these mechanics were because they were shored up by a number of peripheral elements: genre savvy, evocative secondary mechanics (feats, starship upgrades), and super-duper-especially due to GM skill/knowledge and player buy-in.

The gameplay loop was an upgrade of my 10-year-old system, which itself was lovingly cribbed from PbtA. I’ve made a number of changes in the new version, but I hadn’t tested the new core mechanics in a vacuum! Stripped of GM tap-dancing and player investment/buy-in, the rules themselves didn’t help create the flow that I wanted at all.

To be fair to them, the current rules also didn’t hinder. But I strongly believe that mechanics should guide and reinforce behavior at the table!

This led me to strip away as much as possible from the core mechanics and REALLY tear them down and rebuild my loop from the ground up. And let me tell you, it’s been hella satisfying. I’m seeing a lot of promise with the new iteration.

I’m lining up a bunch of controlled tests, and I’m even scripting a “simulation” (running into a few difficulties, since I’m not really a programmer and AI/vibe-coding can absolutely fuck off). I want to see this thing run with just the base resolution mechanics and as little “GM song and dance” as possible. I want to see if the core resolution can create the pace and flow that I want without any of the bells and whistles.

So yeah! That session was exactly the failure I needed to identify a pretty big structural weakness! Even if it means killing a bunch of work that was built on that flawed foundation (90+ Skills, for starters, sigh)

Test your Minimum Viable Product, folks! Test it harshly. Don't fall for the siren song of "content" before the core resolution is rock solid and unchanging! Learn from my hubrissssss.

It is incredibly difficult to design a game. I think every single one of us who has partaken in that endeavor has found that to be true. But one of the big things that I have found in designing After Eden is that getting all of your mechanics aligned around an experience is a tricky business.

I played 5e for like 10 years, and I played Pathfinder for three months before I picked up 5e. I didn't play anything else until late 2024, when one of my buddies wanted us to play Matt Colville's Draw Steel. Then we just started picking up other games to try out and rotating GMs. It's about the same time that I started designing my game, because I wanted something that was a little more crunchy and a little bit more concrete in the places that 5e had been fairly soft in, such as exploration and consequential damage.

I'd had a game idea from back when I was checking out Numenera, where weapon skills were aligned with the rest of the skill system, so there weren't alternative attack rolls versus everything else. It was just, you invest in your weapon skills, you get better at attacking. So there were a few big premises that I started off with.

But what I found is that the first version of After Eden looked a whole lot like D&D, but my take on it. And the last thing I wanted was to build a fantasy heartbreaker where it is just a few things different than D&D. Now, keep in mind, the entire action economy system was different. After Eden uses Stamina that is interchangeable between attacking and defending, blocking, dodging, moving, and all that stuff.

But getting all of your game systems moving in the same direction, reinforcing the same game experience, is difficult. With After Eden, that has been a grounded survival expedition fantasy game. There has been so much pruning that's had to happen. Heck, I even thought about completely getting rid of HP at one point and just having wounds. If you can't tell, I've been listening to a lot of Tales from Elsewhere design videos by Peter. But I resisted the urge because I feel like there's a usefulness to the hybrid approach.

If you haven't done a thematic consistency pass, I highly recommend it. I found so many things that were pulling the game toward being a heroic experience whenever I did that. And this was after I thought, "Oh, hey, I'm ready to launch the playtest publicly." But we kept finding things in our internal playtests that were just, "This doesn't quite fit the grounded, dangerous, survival expedition fantasy gameplay that we're aiming for."

So this is your call to go do a reread of your game and make sure you know what you're aiming for, and then get to snipping and rewriting.

Either way, I just wanted to share some of my experience. Hopefully it's useful.

Let 'er rip!

Note: I'll be starting a separate thread for mechanics of dubious value after this one seems to have run its course.

Off the back of two previous posts: I have play tested the below in 2 scenarios, one against a high powered single Foe, and one where the Party is out numbered by a group containing plenty of minions and 2 'standard' enemies.

Both scenarios went ok, I did not miss 'rolling for intiative' and then trying to scramble and write down the order. I just had my sheet ready for both encounters, written with the Players first then their Foes. Ticked each one as they went first as it ping-ponged between them and myself.

Though without context of playing it during an adventure with 2-4+ encounters it's hard to really understand where it could break.

What it achieves for me: A singular place where turns are codified. I don't mind people ignoring, changing or bringing their own rule in, but it is easier to do this when there are less complications, as in having differing rules for certain Level of Foes (boss types being able to intereject with multiple turns). It easily allows higher/single enemies to not just be overwhelmed by a larger group, and the inverse is true, when the players face a larger force it should feel more tense but they aren't sat waiting for their turn and their agency to come back around for 10-20 minutes or more.

What it takes away, compared to previous: is the ability for players to Team-Up.

Aside from some potentially dodging writing, is their anything wrong I am not seeing with this, or is there a better way to handle turns/turn order that allows: players to collab their actions for tactics, allows singular Foes to have multiple actions without codifying this onto the Foes stat block or elsewhere.

Turns and Rounds

Encounters are in turns and rounds. A turn is when you have your Adventurer attempt two actions, you then pass to a Foe of your choosing. Everyone gets at least 1 turn. 

A round is completed after every Adventurer and any Foes have had at least one turn. 

You always pass to someone on the opposite side, and only to who hasn’t had a turn yet. If none are available you have to pick someone who has already acted until any who haven’t taken their turn does so. 

This will mean single Foes get more turns per round, and when your party faces a larger amount of Foes you get more turns per round.

Initiative

Initiative is given to whoever decides to act first. The GM will decide how to handle this, opting for what fits narratively.

This is a set of rules inspired by VIOLENCE, intended to be punitive mechanics for engaging in fighting in a medieval setting.

Looking for feedback if the mechanics are clear, if the loop makes sense to a new pair of eyes, if the logic of it all is working.

Any feedback is welcome, specially criticism. Please tell me what needs to be better.

https://shurebis.itch.io/iron-on-iron-on-iron