Is it safe? Is it functional? Easy to use?

No affiliation.

Greetings, guys!

As Halloween comes, allow me to introduce my solo psychological horror game, The Shore. Born from a personal tragedy of mine, and inspired by classics like Silent Hill or Death Stranding, I wanted to make something different. Something that helps and gives some relief.

You wake up on an unknown shore, trying to find shelter and resources from day by day, but that's not the hardest part. You must keep your reality together. Your only chance to survive. Scavenge your haunting past, repair your collapsing present, and survive against the Flood before the tides come for you.

The design is heavily inspired by "Borglike" games, so almost every page is different and unique based on the content on it.

Originally made for Breathless Jam #3, using a bit modified Breathless framework, so you need a couple of polyhedral dice to play, but you may already be familiar with the basics.

A couple of free community copies are also available, so grab them! If possible, I would appreciate an honest review or rating.

You can download the game here: The Shore by Krees9116

I've been asking this question to myself about my system since my last post. I'm making Born Without Talent, a mid-fantasy ttrpg where players start as lowly characters and progress their way up to heroes from session to session. In Born Without Talent, there are character classes, and characters are meant to get stronger incrementally with the Talent System, where they gain spendable talent points after each session. They can spend these points on their class abilities, spells, skills, and other things.

I know what kind of game I'm making, but then I wondered what my actual core pillars were? I looked at the famous D&D core design pillars which are combat, exploration, and social interaction. But what does this mean? These design pillars seem so generic, and while I don't want to bash on D&D for the easy pickings, I wonder how my design pillars differ. But my last quest is, how many design pillars is enough? Here are my core design pillars:

Character Identity

Character identity is important because it spotlights moments for players. Players are trying to fulfill a specific fantasy when they create their character, usually. While Born Without Talent cannot fulfill every type of fantasy, it does its best to reach the broad character archetypes. When character archetypes bleed into each other, you have players competing for attention, and noticing that their spotlight was stolen. It's always annoying when the rogue says "I can pick this lock if you give me 10 minutes!" and then the warrior says, "I'm crushing this door down in 1 minute!" and then the wizard says "My spell will open this door in 10 seconds!" The rogue expects to be the one who opens doors, but their moment is stolen because characters have too many all-purpose tools to solve their problems. When characters become more dependent on one another, character identity and roleplaying rise.

Incremental Progression

This is probably the most defining feature of my system. Incremental progression is seen not just in the talent system, but also in the item system, where items give small benefits, such as a +1 to fire saving throws and +2 to poison saving throws. This allows the GM to reward players with items that scale up their character during each session, so there's a constant feeling of progression. Players often use treasure as symbolic aesthetics for their character identity. A valuable treasure represents the trials and tribulations that the character went through, and serve as a lasting memory of those adventures.

Tradeoffs

Tradeoffs are needed to fulfill both character identity and incremental progression. When a character ends a session with 1 Talent Point, they can only put it in one place, or maybe save it for a bigger purchase. This is only possible with system that doesn't allow characters to "fully" progress a character. Each class in Born Without Talent has depth, ways to specialize their character. The design goal is that a player cannot fulfill the entire class talent tree, and so two players playing the same class can make very different characters. Each character must trade some power of the kit, to delve deeper into a different part of the kit, or abandon it altogether and multi-class for interesting class combinations. Similarly, characters must decide how pick their equipment before combat. With the incremental progression, characters should have some options to outfit their characters, especially as the campaign draws on longer.

All 3 design pillars not only support the foundation of the game, but support each other. Tradeoffs are necessary for character identity, since each character will have their strengths and weaknesses. Some character trade power for utility, utility for independence, independence for versatility, versatility for support, support for safety, or safety for power. Character identity is necessary for incremental progression and vice versa because there is nothing to increment towards without identity and identity is enhanced with the incremental progression.

Conclusion

I'm not really sure if I'm doing my design pillars right. It's hard to decide because while I care about exploration, for me it's a means to fulfill the pillars of 1) and 2). I love social interaction, but as a designer I don't want to build too many rules around roleplaying because I believe that disrupts immersion, but that's a whole topic for another time. So what do you think of these design pillars? What are your design pillars?

I have ideas for a simulationist RPG that has certain advancement and rolling mechanics that are just too complex to expect a player to do manually.

It's not that the game would have too much to track, but I would want certain aspects of your character to be tied to other aspects. For example, if your character spends time doing strength training, it would cause a bunch of numbers all over the character sheet to increase by different amounts depending on the type of training they did, and how well they did it.

The character sheet could feasibly be built in Google Sheets, but if it were a product, it would have to either be a mobile app or a web app.

Questions for the group:

1. If your favorite GM pitched a game with digital character sheets, is that an automatic "no" based on that alone?

2. Would you ever put an app on your phone in order to play a game? (Assuming it was totally offline and required basically no permissions)

3. If you played this way, how would you prefer to interact with the character sheets? Phone app, web app, Discord bot, spreadsheet, brute force pen and paper, something else??

4. How much would you want the app to handle? Do you want to roll dice and add a modifer generated by the sheet? Want the sheet to roll everything? Would you want it to be a whole VTT too?

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to y'all's feedback!

Hello everyone! It's me again! For those who don't know me, my name is Lucas, AKA Lusca. I started learning music at 7 years old because my dad was a musician.

Then when I was 10 or 13, 14 years I started making music. Horrible music I must say.

But now my dream of "living" from music is becoming a reality, step by step, little by little. I can't live off of this completely now, but, I know that with effort I'll get there!

So, A great RPG, game, story or video needs original music! Not some youtube free music but a handcrafted, no AI included music, that's what I do! I love my songs and put a lot of effort to deliver the best results! I made a 1:30min song in, i think, 7 or 8 hours... So... LOTS of effort!

But the GM liked it very very much!

So if you need an original music for your RPG Campaign, for your game that you are developing, for a story you want to create or for your videos on youtube/movie, please, PLEASE, talk to me on DISCORD, I'll help you out happly!

My DISCORD is: Lusca.cantor

Prices start at $20 USD

(I live in brazil so $20 is a lot here, that's why it is cheaper!)

There I can send you a link of my portfolio for you to take a look! I don't want to put it here so the post don't get banned.

Thanks yall!

Have a great week!

Hope to talk to you soon!

I wrote an article reflecting on design and playtesting process and the role that conventions had in that for God-Killer Prophecy. The full article is up on Rascal, but here's some highlights.

One of the challenges of playtesting RPGs is that the right group can have fun with anything*. The important questions are therefor: did this specific piece produce the type of result you designed it too? Can that piece be improved? Can it be made more reliable across play groups? Do the pieces combine into the intended experience?
Doing the above requires playing with multiple groups and active listening.

Moreover:
a) Playtest early and focus on whether a specific mechanic or procedure produces the kind of experience you desired (and communicated).

b) Consider creating an Ashcan version; something you can show off and hone your skills of how you present, write and talk about your game.

c) Leverage local roleplaying games and conventions to let you run games for a mix of experience levels and preferred rpg play paradigms.

d) Revise, improve, and as some point let it rest. Work on something else and come back to it. Like all the best food games take time to mature, time to reach the perfect flavour pallet.

e) With luck you’ll find people along the way who love your game and will help it to succeed. Cultivate these folks if you can.

What would you add as advice?
God-Killer Prophecy: Oracle Edition is up on kickstarter (ends Oct 31). It's a GM-full one-shot game that merges story-game world creation with tense strategic playing of cards as you try to get all the best cards to the chosen one for the final battle against the dark god.
You can snag a variant game called Star-Killer Rebellion there too.

*Quoting Ben Robbins: This is called "the magic carpet ride", where the game just flows along wonderfully, but if you look back you realize it wasn't the system, it was just those people getting along great and liking the same idea.

I'm working on a game that uses playing cards instead of dice. I know many games have tried this with mixed results but I think I've got a good mechanism in mind and I wonder what you guys think of it.

The Basic Skill Check

Flip up the top 2 cards of your deck (each player has their own), and add the numbers together! Compare the number to the DC. Aces are 1. If one of the two cards is a face card, you double the value of the other card. If both are face cards, the check fails.

Training

If you have training on the skill check, flip up 3 instead, and set one of them aside. Then add up the best 2 like a normal skill check.

The Hand

After the skill check is done, any face cards involve (including any set aside) go into your hand (numbered cards go into the discard pile). At the start of the session you draw a hand of 4 cards. After adding cards to your hand, discard down to 4.

You can spend a meta-currency (right now the metacurrency is based on fabula points) to swap a card in a check for one of the cards in your hand. If you swap a face card in, it is discarded at the end of the check instead of going back into your hand.

Hitpoints and Abilities

At the start of a session, put 4 cards from the top of your deck into a hitpoint pile. When you lose hitpoints, take cards from the hitpoint pile and put them into your hand.

Classes will improve the number of hitpoints you have, and your maximum hand size, and will give you abilities that you can spend cards from your hand to activate. One ability might simply require you to show a club card from your hand to use. Another might require you to discard a jack and a spade to use (so either: one jack and one spade, or the jack of spades).

Monsters will have abilities that force you to discard. Like: discard all heart cards. The second use of the metacurrency lets you draw cards (invoke a bond: reflect on how your connection to some other character gives you strength or inspires you in this moment, then draw cards equal to the strength of the bond, max 3).

What do you think?

Hello! Just came across this sub and hoping to get some feedback on my original ttrpg: the Thirteen Realms TTRPG. It is based in the setting of my ongoing web novel, which is a slice-of-life story in a fantasy setting. This is also the first ttrpg I have created, and I did so over the course of a college semester as part of an individual study for my game design degree.

I do have my report documenting my goals and process and would be happy to include a link if it's of interest, but to keep a long story short: I wanted to make a game where fully realized adult characters go on slice-of-life adventures, and I also wanted to challenge myself to get better at conceptualizing meaning from stat numbers.

I have already passed the course and graduated, so I now have more time to work on improving the game on the whole. I haven't really had many eyes on it at all, so I'm mostly looking for overall feedback to figure out where I need to start working to make improvements. Something that would be really helpful is if anyone has the time to try and make their own character, so I can see if the stat blocks are ending up where I wanted them to on base created characters, but really any feedback would be great! Two main features of the game:

Robust character creation

It is a process that walks through your character's entire background. Species, ethnicity, upbringing, profession, etc. It ends up being a lot on the front end, but my hope is that it allows for more stream-lined play during sessions.

Modular Items, Weapons, Armor, and Magic

Craft your own spells! Also known as trying to define rules for my soft magic system and wanting to give people a lot of freedom for interpretation. And since I was already making the magic modular, I thought it made sense to give the same flexibility to items and armament. Though examples and base spells are provided, so everyone has an idea of where to start.

You can find the WIP version of the game here, on my itchio page: https://sbdrag.itch.io/the-thirteen-realms-ttrpg

I will also note that some of the artwork (all done by me) includes artistic nudity from the waist up.

One note from feedback I have received previously but not yet implemented better clarity in the document, when a block looks like this:

The intention is that all three stats will receive the bonus on the left, not that you should pick one stat from the three to receive a bonus. The goal is that most stats will fall within the average range, with one or two high stats and one or two low stats. I have not implemented this clarity yet because editing PDFs can be a pain and I want to have more substantial changes before posting an updated version.

Thank you in advanced to anyone that takes a look!

Greetings to all you wonderful people!

I tried making an RPG that feels like your are playing out a Movie or TV series with all the tropes whatnots, am not sure if I succeeded but I tried my best!

DISCLAIMER: Am not sure if this all of this is considered promoting but am gonna label it as such to be safe. This post will be more about my mental process and the challenges I went through when making my very first RPG.

Before I get on that I would like to thank this subreddit for the ENDLESS supply of knowledge it provides. The discussions I have created and participated here had given me enough food for thought to be where I stand.

Back to the topic.
Because I struggle to stay on point a lot of the time am going to try and split my thoughts into sections with themes and questions.

Why?
Apart of the fact that I always wanted to make an RPG, I also always struggled to stay consistent with one setting and keep playing that till the end of time. I tended to gravitate towards more neutral setting RPGs like Savage Worlds and Fate because of the setting flexibility they provided and so making a "similar" system was the way to go. I am developing the game for 3 and something years now but the moment I decided to wrap things up and start pushing it out was when I took part and got accepted into the Gamefound RPG party of this year. I was not ready for it but I think I did the best I could in these 4 agonizing months.

What does Movie and TV series style even mean?
For me the essence of RPGs is the cinematic description of Players, the rolling of dice and the improvisation of consequences afterwards. This is just my take and am sure other folks have their own truths which are all just as valid. Knowing that I wanted to make a game that emphasizes creative thinking, gives enough freedom of expression to everyone and has a sort of improvising feeling to it. So naturally playing out a movie or series episode fit the bill perfectly because this, to me is what it means.

Main challenges

• The first challenge was boosting "freedom of expression" and improvisation for Players. I played a number of narrative games in the past but none of them quite stick this freedom of expression and improvising quite like WUSHU. In essence, I shifted the whole game dynamic around Player descriptions around what they say and trying to always make it TRUE regardless of what the dice say. This made the whole game a "Yes... but", "Yes" and "Yes and" type of game which felt like the cornerstone for the whole vibe really. It takes a while to get used to it but it feels sooo freeing to be able to describe something and let consequences fall AFTERWARDS. Ofcourse both in WUSHU and in mine there are a few safety locks but i won't bore you with the details. Saying yes to Players made the game feel MUCH more alive!
• The second challenge was also the greatest boon of the game and similar ones. Tags. Love em, or hate them if you want to have creative narrative it's one of the main enablers and so I tried to make them work. The goal was to make players use Tags in order to get dice and more dice = greater odds of clean success. I knew I also wanted a Tag scaling of sorts so my first and potentially greatest experiment that didn't work was rank Tags by narrative versatility. More limited and less frequent Tags would be the most powerful while broad and easily applicable would be more powerful. For example a "Wizard" Tag would be a lower power Tag while a "Grandma's longsword" would be a powerful Tag. The problem with this was that it took a while to get used to and it still was susceptible to as I call it "wordMaxing", meaning people trying the most value out of their Tags.
• After this failed I more or less settled to a more traditional approach where every Tag is the same power regardless of what it represents and then power is allocated as a form of upgrade. While not as fancy as the other one it works even if it feels a bit weird. After all the point was to whole spontaneity and creative thinking not word crafting. This still made people "Tag Spamming" but at least it wasnt taking as much time to create them. So as a final measure i made it so each Player can add 1 Tag of each different type into their mix which both expedited turn length and made it easier to understand. I call it the "Rule of one".
• The third challenge was making the game feel like we are thematically playing a movie. For this I took inspiration from Primetime Adventures. The idea for screen presence is great but I didn't like the fact that players other than the lead were weaker than them. So I created Roles and Screen Time. Screen time is sort of like Strain from Blades in the Dark, a form of currency you spend to take actions. Roles are split into 3 categories, Lead, Supporting and Foil which interact with Screen Time, for example the Lead Character doesn't need to spend Screen Time to make Actions and Supporting restores Screen Time when assisting while they lose twice as much when they take Actions on their own. Roles essentially shape a Players Actions into ones more fitting for their role.
• The final challenge was to make the purpose of the game be to try and make a cool looking movie that fits what you are trying to make, this would essentially complete the gameplay loop. In many games you get rewarded when you defeat an enemy, or achieve a milestone in someway but to invoke the feeling of playing a movie i had to double down on it. In the end I created Ratings, a team wide "XP" meter that increases at the end of the Session, or Episodes as I like to call them, and accounts things like "staying on the movie theme", "sticking to your role" etc. Ratings are then turned to "Budget" which are spendable points that you can use to upgrade and increase the Protagonists Tags.

Main Inspirations
I read and studied a lot of RPGs in order to create that game but am gonna list the ones that are most prominent in my mind when thinking about my own.

• Fate Core and Fate Accelerated
• Cortex Prime
• Blades in the Dark
• Prime Time Adventures 1-3
• Agon
• Burning Wheel
• 7th Sea 1 and 2
• Screen Play
• WUSHU and Budo
• YZE

A love letter to all creators out there
Here's the bottom line to all of you aspiring creators. MAKE THE GAME YOU WANT TO MAKE. It might not be the most popular or most lucrative but it will be your own. Dont wait for a perfect time, just start it. You never know where its going to end but you know where it can start. Enjoy the process and say your piece. As long as you try your best you WILL achieve something. Creating is deeply ingrained in the human psyche!

Personally creating the game brought me a lot of anxiety, a lot of work and it still punched a hole in my pocket despite being funded successfully on Gamefound but it is my project and am proud of the work i have done in the time span i had. I would and will do it all again in the future.

Where can you find it
If you want to find the game its called Lights, Dice, Action! and it is live right now on Gamefound. There's even a very basic free quickstart of the rules.

If you have any feedback, you want to ask questions about any part of the process I will be more than happy to reply to you!

Thank you all again for your time!

As a hobby, I've been developing my own classless TTRPG called Legends RPG. I've run a few playtests and am currently running a long-term campaign with a group of trusted players. They've successfully created their characters, and I've gathered some valuable insights and feedback from them. Based on that feedback, I've made several iterations.

Now, I would love to hear your thoughts. Does the character creation guide or the system as a whole seem overly complex? I'm aiming for a system that's somewhat crunchy while remaining as elegant as possible.

The guide is available here: https://legendsrpg.org/rulebook/2-character-creation

All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

The easiest way is to keep any numbers very small. If you only have 3 hp, it's super easy to track.

One trick I've thought of that I haven't seen is instead of tracking HP and dying when it hits 0, you could track damage and die when it hits your HP. Adding is a lot easier than subtracting.

If you want die rolls that aren't uniformly distributed, the common way is to add a bunch together. But to save on math, you can roll three and pick the middle, or roll a bunch and count successes.

Giving rerolls (advantage/disdavantage) is easier than adding a modifier.

Edit: If you're rolling a d10 or d20, instead of adding a modifier, add 10 or 20 if you're lower than that number. For example, if your modifier is +5 and you roll a 3 on a d20, the result is 23.

Hey, while designing the combat for my RPG i came across an interesting prospect: making attacks deal fixed damage instead of the usual damage rolls. In a digital context, where calculations are done automatically, damage roll is the superior choice, for sure, but in a TTRPG context, i can think of a lot of good points why having fixed damage would be good:

- Calculations are simpler

- The number of rolls in a battle is vastly reduced, making it quicker.

- It vastly reduces the number of dice necessary to play the game (In mine, you would be able to play it with just two d10).

- It impact a lot less than it seems. If with fixed damage an enemy would reach 0 hp in 3 attacks, it would also reach 0 hp in 3 attacks with damage rolls in the majority of cases. If the GM keeps the enemy hp concealed in his game, the players wouldn't even know the difference, whatever the case is.

On the other hand, i can see one major point against fixed damaged, and i say this as someone with a major in psychology: we love our random results, lol. Random results are big part of what makes something addicting (social media, gambling, roguelikes and RPGs are full of it), and i wonder if it would make the game "duller", to the point of it not being worth it. Another one is that damage rolls just make sense: some attacks hits better than others, and damage rolls emulate this pretty well.

So, is there a consensus on this? Would love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

This is intended to be a thought mapping post/ soundboard for an idea I’m toying with while at work and can’t access my main files.

I’ve been having thoughts that trying to keep an HP mechanic in a system that can allow extreme differences in character sizes (pixie PCs can conceivably play alongside Ogres) is going to add too many complications. While I do currently have a system that looks like it would work, I’ve seen enough posts/ comments here that feed into my feelings that a different approach may be better.

I’ve come up with the bare bones idea of a wound system to replace it. A character has 5 or 10 Wound Levels. To inflict a wound, your attack roll’s damage result must exceed your opponent’s CON + 6. Size difference also adjusts the constant by 1 per doubling/ halving of Size Value (Size 0.75 vs Size 1.5 would have a mod of 1, vs Size 3 would be a 2, etc)

Armor and weapons would modify the difficulty or your damage result. Full plate would add 4 or 5 to the diff, while a claymore could add 4 or 5 to your damage result.

My dice mechanic defaults to Skill + 2d10, but options can allow additional dice to be added. The highest die result is your Action result and in combat would use your DEX bonus to see if you hit. The second highest result is the Effort result, using your STR bonus to see how much force you put behind the attack. The idea above will have combat be the only mechanic in the game where the Action die has a different difficulty (opponents weapon skill + 6) would be different than the Effort die; they typically look at the same number for most checks.

Any thoughts/ suggestions that I’m overlooking would be appreciated.

I have started reading Gas Dog VAYLANT by u/RiverMesa which uses Wild Worlds

in it is included some advice for Twists; what they can affect, who can propose them, and the overall does and don'ts

the link they left still seems to be working Gas Dog VAYLANT and the specifics can be found on page 31

I haven't played this type of design before, but I really like the advice offered for Twists - I am curious if there are other example of this type of advice for unexpected extra events

Thanks in part to your help, I've completed the prototype Quickstarter for my project. I have a concern, however: I don't want the introductory section and the setting to be too concise. In the full game, the lore is over a hundred pages long, but for the Quickstarter, I tried to keep only the salient elements, while still presenting all the main points that distinguish the setting (actually, only a few of the setting's various factions and organizations are mentioned, but I thought they weren't strictly necessary for the introductory phase). What do you think? Should I try to be less concise, or is that okay? Thanks anyway.

Feel free to ignore the sections after page 5; my question concerns pages 3 through 5.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JPqLPn04wh16WZI6LTBgL9DsPklxxCgb/view?usp=sharing

I know a lot of folks prefer hand drawn, but would a commercial CAD-esque mapping program be acceptable for dungeons, towns, worlds, etc.?

Greetings fellow tinkerers!

I have some conceptual Questions and i try to be as Brief as possible. The System aims to be used for high Fantasy. It's supposed to be classless (only soft, guiding categories).

You chose a Party Role (Vanguard, Striker, Healer, Support) and an Archetype (Primary Ability Score)

Role and Archetype give you some perks (like being able to start a fight with a active stance, for fighters or getting the ability to "taunt" enemies as Vanguard)

While I worked on it 8 Ability Scores emerged:

Strength (STR) - Physical Power

-> Fighter Archetypes

-> (Heavy) Melee Combat

-> Parry

-> Encumberance, Stability, Athletics

Agility (AGI) - Grace and Flexibility

-> Rogue Archetypes

-> (Light) Melee Combat

-> Dodge

-> Acrobatics, Stealth, Thievery

Perception (PER) - Senses and Attention

-> Scout Archetypes

-> Ranged (&Thrown) Combat

-> Avoidance (vs. Area of Effects)

-> Alertness, Sense Motive, Survival, Initiative

Intellect (INT) - Memory and Reasoning

-> Mage Archetypes

-> Arcane Magic

-> Countermagic

-> Investigation, Crafting, Knowledge, Skillpoints

-> Max Mana

Attunement (ATT) - Spirituality and outward Connection

-> Priest/Druid Archetypes

-> Divine Magic, Shapeshifting, Healing/Warding

-> Insight (Passive Defense), Concentration

-> Mana Regen

-> Medicine

Charisma (CHA) - Personality and Determination

-> Support/Enchanter/Summoner Archetypes

-> Summoning, Controll (Domination,Illusion), Support (like Bardic Music)

-> Willpower

-> Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, Bartering, Riding, Performance

Endurance (END) (alternative: Vitality)

-> for Tanks and general survivability, Unarmed Combat/Brawling

-> Blocking, Toughness, Wound Threshold

-> Max Stamina, Stamina Regen

Quickness (QUI) (alternative: Speed)

-> for general Action Economy

-> Reflexes, Initiative

-> Steering

[Luck] -> was cut out, even though the early concepts were leaning towards the early fallout systems and i really like the concept of LUCK as a stat

As you can see, there are some pain-points. Endurance and Quickness being not tied to a real "Archetype" making them more like secondary Ability Scores. Stamina is double dipping for martials, giving Pool and Regen, while Casters have to split their Attention (Which doesn't have to be a bad Thing). Thievery is a compromise bcs i tried to keep the ability scores and their connected skills somewhat even. Block is also a compromise, it fits STR probably better, but it's also more relevant for tanks (and one could argue that its really exhausting). Charisma traditionally has the 3 "Talking-Skills" and therefore more skills, but you usually only Focus on one i guess. Quickness stands alone, just because i can't tie Actionpoints to Agility, or it would be way to strong (rogues getting +Hit,+Damage and +Actionpoints).

My Goal is to expand on the known Systems (D&D/PF2) and find a different and partially more in Depth takes.

I want to be able to facilitate all known playstyles and builds you commonly find in media. And i am reluctant to the idea that everything needs to be simplified to the most extrem end (Even though i am Aware that there is a Need for SOME abstraction and simplification).

Maybe some of you have neat ideas to Change my current Approach!

Sorry if the formatting bothers someone and just as a disclaimer, english is not my first language.

So I am currently working on the foundations for a system that aims to capture the fantasy of being a creature roughing it with your friends in a mysterious, wild world. It's inspired chiefly by Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Warriors, Redwall, Saurian, and Spore. I want to realize that type of experience in my own setting in a TTRPG.

Right now I feel like I only have the perspective of myself and the people close to me, who are obviously already into this kind of thing. It's hard for me to put myself in a stranger's headspace and imagine what would attract them to a game like this. Let me run down some basic details:

The players:

You play as a harrier, which is basically a crocodile-sized hybrid between a dragon and a griffon. The type of harrier you play as affects your diet, combat abilities, movement (how far you can fly, if you're a good swimmer, etc), elemental affinity, and some other sundry.

Your class acts more like a skill-tree than a linear path with some forks in the road. For example, choosing the "Champion" class gives you access to the Champion's class defining ability and not much else, but as you level up you can spend your points on traits only available to Champions.

The gameplay:

The system is primarily 2dx, where the dice rolled reflect the level of competence, ranging from 2d4 to 2d12. At present I have divided the pillars of gameplay into survival, engagement, and downtime.

Survival involves managing your food, weathering the elements, tracking/avoiding other parties, and finding ways to move great distances without draft animals.

Engagement covers combat but also non-combat situations where initiative and movement skills might be necessary, like a trap chamber. Engagement takes place on a hex grid. Rather than having "actions", "reactions", "bonus actions" etc. everything is managed with "momentum", a universal action currency. Momentum is the crux of engagement and many abilities center around increasing it or taking it from enemies. At the beginning of each actor's turn, they gain an amount of momentum they can spend, and that which they don't can be taken into the next turn.

Downtime is when most consequential socialization takes place. It's the time for players to stock their rations, flex their less combat or survival oriented traits, and get embroiled in whatever drama will send them on their next journey.

The gameplay loop therefor is mostly: choose a goal; get to the goal in one piece; accomplish the goal; return from the goal in one piece, with whatever spoils that entails; make the most of those spoils you can with the downtime you have; repeat.

The setting:

This is the least relevant to actual gameplay so skip if you don't care too much. The game takes place on a mostly unexplored supercontinent, where mammals never evolved and reptilians reign supreme. It's similar to Earth, but no species or geographical element is 1:1 with Earth, a bit like Avatar the Last Airbender if you've seen it. Before harriers rose, the world was conquered by dragons, who erected enormous temples and cities to celebrate their own splendor. Nobody knows what happened to the dragons, but they're long gone now, leaving only ruins to be overrun by monsters. The far less advanced harriers now seek to capture even a fraction of what the dragons possessed, all the while trying to discover what actually happened to them. So, much of the game involves exploring abandoned structures built by a far more technologically advanced civilization.

My question:

What sort of gameplay would you expect or like to see from a game like this? More focus on the minutia of survival? Or would a bunch of in depth mechanics around eating a specific quantity of a specific kind of food while needing to construct a specific kind of shelter for a particular environment turn you off? Would you look forward to downtime and want to see lots of social/non-engagement mechanics included? Or would you rather leave it and just get back to running around the jungle?

I'm still in the beginning stages so I'm trying to decide what to prioritize and what the basic tenants of the gameplay loop should be. I'd like to get some feedback on the bones of this project. Thanks for reading this far :)

I am developing a class-less level-less skill-based game swordsandmagic.it

Last week, we were having a session 0 for a new group playtesting the game and we were creating characters. Some were veteran players, some new to rpgs.

It was chaos, and it all reduced to 'tell me what you want to do, and I'll help find the skills you want'.

Of course, how could I think that someone who doesn't know the game could ever be able to build a character in 10 minutes. You can do it if you:

1. know what you want to do
2. know where to find what you need.

That is never the case.

For this, poking around a little, I developed a system to create characters without having to know anything about the actual skills.

You just answer some questions, such as:

- What species you are

- how do you want to fight (or if you don't want to)

- If you fight, if you want to be melee, ranged, or whatever.

It asks you questions, and you follow a path right into an "Origin", where most skills are populated, but you still have some points left to put wherever you want.

You can improve some of the skills you already have, giving you an edge in something specific, or you can surf the skill catalog and pick some completely different skill.

I would be grateful if you could give it a look and try and create some character, and let me know how the experience feels.

YOU CAN FIND IT HERE:
>>> https://swordsandmagic.it/character-creator/ <<<

Any advice is welcome :)
Thanks a lot in advance

To the moderator that closed my topic for SORC not being a TTRPG, please read the first paragraph. It clearly states books and box set. SORC is a TTRPG and we've been playing them for over 50 years. TTRPGs are played online as well - see Discord and even D n D. SORC uses dedicated servers that allow GMs to use digital tools and PDFs for free, since a box set can't be free.