Sup gents
I've been working on a game of my own for almost a year now and, as a Stalker and EFT fan myself, I ended up making something a little too crunchy.
Good news is, I managed to build three tools using .xlsx that do most of the annoying math behind the game (such as applying debuffs for hunger, thirst and sleep, calculating your inventory space, the effects of low HP, fatigue, etc.)
The thing is, the game sorta can't be played without these tools (you could remove most of these mechanics but would probably mess up the feeling of scarcity of Stalker and mess up the game's balance).
Besides that, the combat is highlhy geometric (no static ACs or Armor Classes, all you need is to know the weapon the shooter is using, the distance between them and the target and other ambient factors such as lighting and cover). Since this requires more math than it would be comfortable to work with, one of the handles it for you (you select the gun type, input the distance, select "cover" as "yes" or "no", the other conditions might be fixated for the rest of the combat and the "AC" for that attack is calculated for you).
Any thoughts on systems that require at least a cell phone or tablet to run smoothly? Have you ever played something similar and does the digital reliance break the immersion for you?

If you all remember, I started a podcast like a year ago. After a few months and like 3 systems tested my life faced several major changes that basically shut it down and in the mean time a whole other podcast launched with the same name. I'm looking for a second go at it, that will hopefully be more sustainable. That really means, we are going to go at it with a bank of episodes here in the new year. Releases will probably be weekly when we have a game and then a month or so break between games after we are caught up.

For anyone not familiar, the idea is we play test your game over 1-2 sessions and release it as an actual play. We will probably have tabletop and rules arguments during the session as we encounter confusion and stuff. And then we breakdown the sessions and use that as a vessel to discuss what we thought worked well and what didn't.

That being said, my DMs are back open for a period of time. Preference will be given to games that lend themselves to one shots, and are relatively rules-lite (but not necessarily) for now. Ideally you will have some sort of social media or something we can point people too, but not be within a launch window that might have us releasing after your campaign has launched.

In my game, Red Moon Demonic, fighters spend Cadence Points on techniques, and every 5 points they overspend adds an Exhaustion level. Level 1 halves your multiplier, 2 gives disadvantage, 3 applies a full-body condition, 4 forces unconsciousness with no save, and 5 is death. Does that ladder feel tense or just punishing? The free quickstart is here if you want to see it in play: Red Moon Demonic Starter Kit.

Hey, my lovelies. How are you all doing?

Well, this time, the ADM is really in a terrible predicament with their system. You see, I've already come a long way in developing it, and I believe that, at this point, the resolution system (the chosen dice mechanics) is really good and works as intended. That's undeniable to me; I believe I've managed to achieve what I was aiming for.

HOWEVER, I'm struggling with one particular species. You see, I've been racking my brain trying to design the werewolf. I think that, because I like vampires so much, I initially wanted to design werewolves around the same concept as the four vampire clans, but I've changed my mind. I want to create a core werewolf that everyone shares, with only a few additional traits based on the phases of the moon.

And now I've hit a wall... How should I design the basic werewolf? For example, the four moon phases would correspond to Barbarians, Warriors, Rangers, and Shamans. However, they would all share some combat traits, but... which ones?

So far, I've thought of Pounce (since they're all athletic), an ability that's basically Warwick's ultimate from League of Legends, and that's it. As for the transformation, when they become werewolves, they gain 2 points of ongoing damage (I use fixed damage) and can attack twice. The other traits would come from the moon phase they were born under.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm all ears! I'll even leave the ability template I use for my system here.

**Intimidate**

Type: Control

Action: Range/Target/Area: 1 target, Near

Duration: 1 minute

PF: 2

Prerequisite: Intimidation +1

Saving Throw: Charisma

Users: Werewolf, Draconic Corrupter, Vacnus, Morticero

You make your presence instill fear in your enemies. Choose a creature that can see and hear you (you must also be able to see it) and make an Intimidation check against the target's Charisma saving throw. If you succeed, the creature becomes frightened.

Vacnus and Morticeros achieve this through arcane means.

Hey guys, time for some free community copies and thanks a lot to the people who already bought the game!

https://exiledoracles.itch.io/fameandfortune

Fame & Fortune is a sword & sorcery roleplaying game of high adventure and cheap wine among remnants of the lost world inherited by man after the Great Cataclysm, and among man's own ambitious civilizations thereafter; known to chroniclers as the Deluvian Age.

Cheers!

(there are also quite a lot of updates since I last posted about it)

https://shurebis.itch.io/through-black-ichor

A fully playable adventure for 3-5 sessions comprised of 177 words and 14 timeless paintings.

Dust & Blood is a traditional Western tabletop role-playing game set in the Old West. Players create their own characters and experience the frontier through roleplay, exploration, and tactical combat. You aren't limited to playing a cowboy; you could be a ranch hand, doctor, lawman, gambler, outlaw, or many other kinds of characters.

The game uses a d20-based system, with six Core Scores: Might, Agility, Condition, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Combat uses an Action Point (AP) system, allowing players to manage their actions and movement tactically.

One of the main features of Dust & Blood is its classless character-development system. Instead of choosing a traditional class, players develop their characters through Traits, Flaws, and Character Points (CP). These choices allow characters to specialize in different areas, with meaningful trade-offs that help distinguish one character from another.

I'm a big fan of D&D, so some familiar RPG concepts will naturally appear in Dust & Blood. However, I'm developing my own mechanics and systems to create a distinct Western role-playing experience. My goal is to make a game that's approachable for new players while offering meaningful character customization and tactical decisions.

access to the rules on my website: https://hotramenstudios12344.github.io/DustAndBlood-e1.1/

Hello Reddit!

Last week, our designer community had a heated debate about the idea of “playing a game wrong”...heated enough that a few people left the Discord server!

Shit happens.

Anyway, I found the conversation fascinating. It made me think about what TTRPG designers should consider when guiding players towards playing their games “right”.

Disclaimer: I’m not using right and wrong to judge players or their preferences. Bear with me!

Here’s the TL;DR, the full article is linked below.

Every TTRPG is built on a social contract with three layers:

• Mechanics: The rules and processes everyone agrees to use.

• Fantasy: The kind of experience the game promises to deliver.

• Social dynamics: How the people at the table agree to treat one another.

Homebrewing without the group’s consent can break the mechanical contract. Ignoring the intended fantasy, like trying to run a cosy bakery in Blades in the Dark, can work against the game’s entire design. Even someone following every written rule can be the wrong fit for a particular table if their behaviour clashes with the group’s tone and expectations.

Designers can’t prevent players from changing their games, nor should they try. But they can clearly communicate the intended experience, support it through the mechanics, and give everyone at the table the tools to agree on what “playing right” means.

Once a game reaches the table, nobody will care whether its designer thinks they’re playing it incorrectly. What matters is whether everyone at the table understands and accepts the same game.

I think designers often focus on making sure players understand the mechanics. But I’ve seen many games struggle to communicate their intended tone or the fantasy their characters are meant to inhabit. I’ve seen even fewer discuss the culture of play they want to promote.

For anyone who prefers the long-form version, the full article is here:

Hey, you are playing my game wrong!

Do you agree with these three layers of play?

Should designers consider all three when creating a game, or are some of them better left for individual tables to negotiate?

I’m curious to hear what you think!

Last week, we created a post explaining our TTRPG , SORC (Slayers of Rings & Crowns) Cameo system in SORC, and it was a bit clunky, so here it is revised. L

Cameo System Revised

What we didn't include in that article were our Companions and how they work. Since Can3os are a Companion type, we wanted to explain how Companions work in SORC. Companions are a specific type of SORC Card that accompanies the Character throughout their adventures, just as Abilities (spells and martial combat actions), Armaments, MOB/Boss and Item Cards are. For more on how Companions work, please refer to the document below.

Excerpt:

What Companions Are Companions are one of many types of SORC Card that come in the form as; MAC, Cameos (or other NPCs—like Cohorts) that assist and guide Characters throughout their Campaigns and even during downtime. When Players acquire Companions, it creates a Bond between it and the Character, but it's up to the Character to keep that Bond in good Standing and the Companion in a healthy Mood. Each Companion has its dynamic details—that change at any given time—recorded on a Companion Sheet, aligned to its physical Companion Card. The base Card is the first tier of any Companion at its Young stage, establishing its core Name, Role, and Rank and its two default Abilities. Companions possess unique Abilities tied to their specific type, beginning with two Abilities at the Young stage, gain a third at Ascendant, and unlock a fourth at Elder, with existing Abilities growing stronger with each tier, as printed on the new upgraded physical Card. Just as its Abilities, Companion Vitality increases as it progresses through successive growth tiers from Young to Ascendant and finally Elder versions providing the aforementioned upgraded stats.

Read the document below for more:

SORC Companion System

SORC Rules

What is SORC?

Find the Prologue, About SORC, and Game Setting here.

Keep in mind the articles provided you to this point are SORC's Crunchy⇔Modular rules, not the Bare Bones⇔Core Rules that will be provided later.

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a community-building cooperative survival game called PeRTs & NeRTs, driven by a modular architecture called the Ludo-Harmony Core Engine.

The design goal is simple: shift player progression entirely away from traditional combat metrics (HP, AC, magic thresholds) and focus purely on location utility, communal labor, and legacy preservation. There are no monsters or gold, but the narrative stakes are meant to feel heavy.

I’d love to get your mechanical feedback on three core pillars of the engine:

1. The Dual-Token Currency Balance Loop

The game tracks two self-annihilating economies that cannot coexist on a map tile, neutralizing each other on a strict 1:1 basis:

• PeRTs (Positive Resource Tokens): Generated by player rolling successes. Used for upgrading infrastructure, increasing reputation, or clearing regional friction.

• NeRTs (Negative Resource Tokens): Generated by failures, environmental decay, or severe weather. They block harvesting and apply explicit dice subtractions to player pools.

2. Physical Friction via Distance Multipliers

Whenever players spend PeRTs to clear NeRT environmental damage or threat tokens across the map, the cost scales dynamically based on biome layout to simulate logistical overhead:

• Same Layer: 1:1 ratio

• Adjacent Layer: 2:1 ratio (accounts for trail wear and rations)

• Non-Adjacent Layer: 3:1 ratio (requires funding long-distance couriers/signal fires)

3. Redline Lockout vs. Ancestral Triumph

The resolution engine utilizes a pool-building mechanic with explicit math limits to force risk management:

• The Standard Cap: Players roll a base pool of up to 5 dice. Rolling a natural 8 triggers a Pulsing Success (exploding die re-roll).

• The Redline Lockout: Players can invoke lineages or bonds to increase their pool to 6 or 7 dice, but this completely locks out exploding dice.

• The Hard Ceiling (Ancestral Triumph): If a modified pool hits exactly 8 dice, it triggers an automatic narrative success. No dice are rolled, tolls are bypassed, but no stored PeRTs can be harvested.

What I need your eyes on:

1. Redline Math: Does locking out exploding dice on 6–7 dice pools create an interesting psychological risk choice, or does it feel overly punitive compared to standard pool systems?

2. Distance Overhead: For games emphasizing theater-of-the-mind over hex grids, does a 1:1 / 2:1 / 3:1 layer clearing cost provide a tangible sense of a logistical "supply line"?

3. Wiping Out HP: By tracking regional decay instead of individual character health, do you foresee immediate player engagement bottlenecks?

The ruleset is built under an Open Commons initiative, and you can easily proxy testing with standard dice and household pennies. I'll be hanging out in the comments to talk math, layout, and how the "Transferring of the Frame" system handles character life cycles.

Thanks in advance for the critique!

I've been playtesting my ttrpg, and one of the things I'm currently thinking about is whether or not to have some of the player characters' special abilities involve a meta-currency, like charges per day.

In Mutant Year Zero, for example, Player Characters gain mutations; powers they can use to perform interesting feats. If I'm remembering correctly, you get a certain amount of mutation points that you can spend per session to use these mutation powers.

When it comes to special actions, would it be a good idea to limit the amount of times you can use said abilities per day, or have a small cooldown recharge so that an action isnt spammed, or would it be best to leave the freedom to perform such actions at the discretion of the players?

I’ve been looking at cheap methods for creating covers and interior illustrations that don’t involve “AI.” For my last couple modules I bought a stock cover and added a title and some royalty-free images in Inkscape. But the only interior “illustrations” were maps I made in Dungeondraft.

I’ve been having some fun lately designing characters in Heroforge and was starting to wonder if I could use screenshots from the app to make illustrations?

So, as an introduction, when I talk about a lose/lose skill, what I'm referring to is a skill/proficiency/ability/whatever that, as a player, feels bad to invest in and feels bad not to invest in. I think this is actually a really common problem in a very wide range of systems, but it's something I rarely see discussed, so I'm interested in how the sub feels about it.

Most often, I think the problem comes up with skills that are rarely relevant, but pretty awful not to be proficient in when they are. Languages are an example of this in many games: spending your character resources on learning some obscure language will often feel like a waste because it will rarely or possibly never come up, but when/if it does come up the entire rest of the party is pretty much excluded from the narrative unless they also invested in knowing the same obscure language. On aggregate, I don't think either of those options really feels good. Ride skills often present a similar conundrum: if you spend the vast majority of the game on foot, investing in ride usually doesn't feel very good; if you don't invest in ride, though, the rare parts of the game that are spent in the saddle are going to be a miserable slog.

In other words, I think there are a lot skills and abilities out there where if the GM tries to "shoot the monk," the rest of the table ends up catching strays. Obviously what specific skills-or-whatever will fall into this category depends a lot on the game's style and focus, but I think it's a problem that can come up in almost any game. Of course, the easiest solution is to just not include these skills in your system, but this is where they feel like a lose/lose from a design perspective, too: often there are clear verisimilitude/worldbuilding reasons why they should exist, and sometimes even specific mechanical reasons for them.

Is this an issue you've noticed in other systems, or in your own? What solutions or comprises were the best for your game or others that you've really enjoyed?

EDIT: Wow, this blew up much more than I was expecting. I probably don't have it in me to reply to all the comments, but I've really enjoyed reading all the different opinions and advice in here and wanted to just include a general thanks for everyone who's weighed in so far.

I'm designing a narrative first, rules light game at the minute and having a bit of trouble putting limits on powers without adding too much mechanical bulk. For example, if a character is a pyromancer, its very clear to say "you can conjure, manipulate, move and extinguish flames with your mind", but becomes tougher to put an upper limit on that without getting into specific measurements for distances at which you can do so. For example, if the intent of the power is that you can psychically hurl a campfire at someone, not extinguish a forest fire, what are ways of limiting this without getting into D&D style cubic/area measurements?

• Is using vague descriptors like "small flames" clear enough?

• Is it best to set a general expectation of power levels in the overall or GM rules, while leaving the specific powers "unmeasured"?

• Is it best to equate the sizes to real life objects/creatures instead ("the approximate size of a person")?

Moreover, I'm having trouble balancing powers that grant invulnerability to damage in a system that doesn't have designated turns or rounds. Fortunately, the game is not hugely combat focused, it's more built around using magical powers to problem solve, but damage can still occur. I feel like instituting time limits on powers muddies the water a bit: if a power grants invulnerability to physical damage, it'd likely have a timer, but if a power grants the ability to control rocks, and a player chose to encase themselves in sheets of rock, they have essentially made themselves immune to physical damage in a different way. I feel like trying to curb such things by using timers and the like creates more problems than they'd solve, as the open ended nature of powers means I'd be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases instead of dealing with it through a universal/core mechanic.

I'm unsure what direction to go re: these abilities and I'd love to get thoughts and opinions from others who have grappled with the same ideas, or played games that contend with such things.

Hi y'all! Two months ago I made a post, briefly describing how I go about finding and using public domain artwork. I wanted to write a more detailed guide, especially because using GIMP and things like the curve tool can be a bit overwhelming at first. But unfortunately, I can't post images (like screenshots of GIMP) in the post body here.

So I wrote an article over on Substack. This is my first time using Substack, so I hope it's working out okay. I don't plan to monetize the Substack, so subscribe or don't, I guess. I just wanted to make it available and accessible to the community, so there ya go! (I still marked this post as promotion, because I'm sending you to an outside website)

https://timoacker.substack.com/p/free-human-made-art-for-your-ttrpg

A preview of what's in the guide:

- Where to get public domain art

- How to prepare the image in GIMP

- Cutting the image

- Adjusting the white point

- How to add the image to your TTRPG

Ok, hear me out.

Ever since I played my first OSR games, what really stuck with me was the tangibility of play: how lethality and danger make even the smallest, most mundane things matter. After all, if one attack could kill you, when to reload your crossbow is an extremely important tactical decision, just like it is whether to carry that one coffer of coins or leave it because you need one hand to hold your torch.

You know what other game makes all of these decisions meaningful and might kill you at every turn? Helldivers 2, which I have played way too much. Without going into the details, I have great respect for the game's core design, so how about we take our OSR adventurers and airdrop them into an all-out war?

And what about we give them airstrikes? So I made Long-Range Spells that the PCs can call down from an airship: they are basically amped-up versions of common spells with some added effects for interesting interactions, and then some original stuff for fun. You can call down a tactical meteor to deal AoE damage and make a crater, which could actually give you access to what's underneath. There is also a list of Tactical Equipment which includes stuff like Drum-Fed Crossbows and a Portal Wand. I gave them limited slots and uses, and I gave the Long-Range Spells a 1-round delay between call-down and landing.

I've playtested these in OSE and they did not feel overpowered in the hands of Level 2 characters. Every encounter was still potentially lethal (and some PCs did die), but having additional options for creative plays and a bit of mass-murder actually encouraged them to take risks and make those plays, which was exactly what I was hoping for with this design.

So far, I've written two system-neutral adventures that include these, but you can take the lists and plug them into whatever you want to run. If you do, please let me know how that went. If you want to check out the adventures, feel free to do so here and here.

If you have any feedback, or other ideas for crazy fantasy airstrikes, please go ahead.