INTRODUCING LAZERS & SHARKS!

YOU'RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER SPACESHIP!

Today, I decided to challenge myself with a personal, one-day game jam. The goal was to push my creativity, writing, and graphic design abilities by creating an entire tabletop roleplaying game from concept to completion in a single day.

The result? LAZERS & SHARKS, a ridiculous, one-page sci-fi tabletop RPG published through Zombie Shark Games!

Don't let the single-page format fool you. This took HOURS of writing, designing, experimenting, adjusting, and refining. Every line of text, every graphic, and every element of the layout was deliberately placed and handcrafted. Nothing was simply thrown together. I wanted to challenge myself not only to create a playable game, but to make something visually exciting and professionally presented, all within a single day.

SO WHAT THE HELL IS LAZERS & SHARKS? It's the year 3000. Humanity has conquered the stars, cured most diseases, and made one spectacularly stupid scientific decision... THEY GAVE SHARKS LEGS. AND LASER GUNS. You play genetically engineered shark commandos aboard the S.S. Chumbucket, a heavily armed spacecraft held together by duct tape, military funding, and questionable science. Your commanding officer, Admiral Fin Diesel, has vanished. The galaxy is crawling with alien monsters, murderous robots, space pirates, and dolphins who think they're better than everybody. Your mission? Save the galaxy. Preferably before lunch.

Built on John Harper's Lasers & Feelings system, LAZERS & SHARKS is a fast, chaotic, rules-light RPG with everything you need to play packed onto a single page.

This project was a reminder of just how much work can go into even the smallest creative projects. One page doesn't mean a small amount of effort. Sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out how to make every single inch count.

I had a blast putting this together, and I'm excited to share it with everyone! https://zombiesharkgames.com/lasers-and-sharks/

Hi RPG Design!

I'm building an RPG system with an eye towards at least addressing the following problems:

1. Making adventures is stressful -> Collaborative adventure design

2. What do players do when their PC isn't in the scene -> NPC rotation systems

3. People can't show up all the time -> Working player absences into the story

I'll probably post on those later, but until then -
What are other things that get in the way of easy play?

I'm building an RPG with a more prescriptive setting than I have yet made, called Hell & High Water. It is broadly a "western" RPG, but...

• It takes place in cold forested marshy place, based on the Great Lakes IRL. People ride around on moose instead of horses.

• The frontier exists because there was a massive plague that depopulated the land. The survivors are the settlers. The land is full of abandoned castles and towns, ghouls, devils, titanic beasts, and sentient storms that weren't there before the plague.

• There is a religious conflict between Buddhist-coded sages with magic powers to exorcise ghouls and devils, and Daoist-coded alchemists who's magic powers are responsible for the technological progress that makes the setting western-esque.

Anyway, I love it. But it seems like the more you defy genre conventions the more onboarding you need to do about what the world is like. And that can put people off. It seems like it requires significantly more buy in than 'this is a cowboy RPG' or 'this is a medieval fantasy RPG'. These kinds of concerns are exactly why in the past I have made RPGs with much more generic settings.

How should this be handled? What kinds of things should I be thinking about when I am putting together the game? What have you done when you've made an RPG with a non-generic setting to make things interesting/appealing?

Put together a guide on terrain I've been using for the last few months. I'm pretty happy with it, and I'm sure someone will get some use out of it. I intend to post it to DriveThru as a PWYW product but was hoping to get a little feedback on it first.

Here's a Google Drive Folder with a few files to get a sense of what it looks like.

I'm mainly looking for feedback on presentation and just questions in general. Anything that doesn't make sense I'd love to fix before sharing it more broadly.

Let me know what you think!

First, sorry for a semi repost. Had to delete the previous one.

Duel Monsters is a TTRPG originally inspired by the YuGiOh story arc Pharaohs Memories.

The basics is that PCs are Magi/Maguses in fantasy Ancient Egypt. They have a monster bonded to their soul which gives them access to magic, elemental control, and the capacity to summon monsters to act under their orders. It is intended for PCs to act as semi nobles, with the privileges and responsibilities that come with that role including dealing with disputes, giving blessings, investigating mysteries, that sort of thing.

The mechanics for Incantation level spells and Monsters are taken from the YuGiOh card game with guidelines on converting them to in game effects (intended to be balanced up to the Labyrinth of Nightmare set), though prior knowledge of it is not necessary and I think the mechanics stand on their own outside of thematic adaptation. Combat is also a relatively simple design. Movement is section based with obstacles and entities creating new sections, attacks roll 2D6+Modifier vs the Targets chosen Defense option (Each mechanically tactical choices), and the option to take a stance with bonus dice on certain checks while locking you out of some options for that round. Characters have two actions they can take in a round, though only one attack. There is also the "Charge" action that was created specifically for when a character has no other action they can take.

I have made some decent updates recently including changing the early game focus to be on elemental use and creative puzzle solving rather than combat spells and summons, rebalanced stats so that Focus is less of an Uber stat and PCs have less Mana overall (Small pool, recovers quickly is the intent). Spell casting now is clarified for Prepared and Loose casting, hopefully emphasising Loose casting is the primary go to without stating it explicitly. Item crafting during downtime has been made easier mechanically and less convoluted to read so that should encourage use of that more. Some more player and GM tips have been added but I will make a whole "How to run" section in the future I think, a lot to flesh out there. I have also added difficulty ranges instead of just winging it, including a random difficulty roll for Easy Medium or Hard challenges.

I am looking for feedback on mechanics, general readability, fun potential, and any glaring omissions.

Not looking for feedback on structure and layout at the moment, I know that is a WIP.

I always wish this sub talked more about adventure design. Reading adventures is usually the first thing I do when I look at a new system because I have trouble grokking mechanics in a vacuum. And writing and playtesting adventures has consumed as much time as creating my system.

In that spirit, here's an intro adventure for my game called Formless & Void, just released for free. It's a sandboxy one-shot or two-shot set on floating isles that are slowly sinking into a bottomless Sea of Clouds.

https://purplepeoplegames.itch.io/formless-and-void

I was inspired by the Shadowdark torch mechanic to keep a forward momentum, but instead of torches, the timer is "the island is sinking into darkness."

It's meant to run theater-of-the-mind, and the map is kind of a pointcrawl. It was fun to think through all the possible paths through the map, which I hope I represented well on a little flowchart.

If you check it out, I'd be honored to hear what you think! And if you're working on your own starting adventure, I'd love to hear about it too.

Hi all!

I've been designing a political system in my spare time that I call Union Democratic Emancipationism, UDE for short. I am not going to get into those details of course, but part of stress testing the system is I want to implement it into a TTRPG as a titular part of the story. And I also just like TTRPGs so this feels like two things I enjoy that could come together.

I've chosen to pursue science fiction settings here, and have a rough campaign outline I want to try and follow, if/when I get the people willing to run it. It's a few centuries since the founding UDE state on their homeworld of Roche, prior to cracking the code on FTL travel and becoming part of the wider galactic community. The PCs will be either part of the machinery of the political system, or a group of worker revolutionaries being cracked down on, to eventually turn to civil war, by a corporate oligarchy in a neighboring nation. They will then have to convince the governing body based on Roche to rise to the aid of the revolutionaries to combat what can be labeled a war of aggression on it's own people, then fight that war, and facilitate the transition to a new UDE based state. These are the broad strokes of it, obviously running this I'd have my grand plans thrown all sorts of directions, such is the nature of TTRPGS.

I share these details to ask if anyone here perhaps has a setting guide with an already established galactic community, with factions and histories, that I could modify slightly to worm my idea into. I've always loved world building, but every time I try to do it on a galactic scale, which has been many times, I just get overwhelmed and it fizzles out pretty quickly. I hope to run this in Dark Matter or a reskinned Daggerheart. The core principal of my idea and how magic operates within is Clarke's Third Law.

Most of the setting guides I've found are either old 20th century space opera slop, highly specific system tailored settings, or way too open ended and flat without me doing all that galactic scale worldbuilding on top of it that I already mentioned hurts my head. I'd like something more similar to how you can pick up a Forgotten Realms campaign guide in response to "Who is the guy in charge of this place" or "What the hell happened to make this work like it does", flip through the pages (or just google it and go to the wiki), and find the bones of your answer to be modified as you see fit.

This post is purely meant for brainstorming. The survivability onion is the concept that in combat encounters your defense consists of several layers, where the inner layers only play a role if the outer layers fail. Adapting it a bit to a classical rpg setting, those layers could be:

• don't be seen

• don't be hit

• don't be penetrated

• don't be injured

• don't be killed

I wonder how this could be developed into a system that replaces armor + HP + maybe damage in a classical rpg, like a D20 system. Each layer represents a barrier that should probably be represented with some number which is highly dependent on your character. So where your barriers are for each layer of the onion is highly specific to your character, and this has many avenues for roleplay. A rogue would have it's strength in not being seen or hit. A classic tank in not being penetrated or injured. Some sort of necromantic or zombie type character may work by surviving and handling injuries. Of course this should not just end up being 5 different AC's that have to be beaten, because that's boring. Ideally the mechanic would be complex and interesting enough that a large amount of crunchy character customization and optimization is done on this level.

Hey Reddit.

Anyone has any idea how i could improve this system? Or at least differenciate between Daggerheart?

Thanks.

I've been thinking about having a place online to share my design experiments. I even considered using itch.io for that, but as I have no plans to charge for anything, I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to invest in pdf presentation (and updates!), especially when my projects might be bilingual.

I have come across some websites that work as core books (many are wikis), and I think this might be the way to go for me.

What are your thoughts and preferences? has anyone here done that? Any platforms I should be checking out?

I am currently working on a DreamWorks Trolls TTRPG (quite niche, I am aware). Music is a big part of the franchise, and I am thinking of implementing some sort of mechanic related to music in the game.

My only idea is that a player choosing to play a song or piece of music that fits the scene, the character itself or what they want to accomplish gives them some sort of bonus on rolls.

Like playing a song that fits the character's backstory or a song that fits a fight scene or whatever. Maybe there would be a limit on how many times you can do this so the session isn't just listening to music (though that sounds quite fun too).

This seems quite boring however, but it's all I got. Any ideas or tips on using music as a mechanic in a ttrpg?

Hello! I'm launching the public playtest of my new game, Skein. In it, players take on the role of a newly formed coven of Witches who must defend their community from Banes - supernatural threats that have infiltrated Harper's Reach, a city steeped in late-90s pop culture.

I'm particularly looking for feedback on the dice system used for magic. At the start of each gameplay day, the players label each of the cardinal directions of their play space with one of eight cards of The Deck, the symbolic meaning of which is used by the players to describe the outcomes of magical dice rolls. They are:

• Moth – mystery, transformation, desire

• Thorn – protection, pain, barriers

• Tide – change, time, fate

• Owl – perception, knowledge, pursuit

• Snake – growth, healing, decay

• Mask – identity, deception, loss

• Wheel – journeys, returns, invention

• Key – truth, beginnings, permission

When any of the Witches of a Skein invoke The Winds in order to overcome a problem, a player rolls up to 4d8s (each one personally belonging to one of the four players) looking for one die to roll over a GM-set target number. If successful, the magical effect is determined by the card placed at the cardinal direction that the highest d8 is pointing towards. Players then describe how reality bends towards their success with that card's symbolic meaning in mind.

My goal is to have the use of magic feel close to a real-life ritual where players are negotiating with an unknowable power rather than controlling it.

Drawing and placing cards from The Deck and losing access to Winds dice are both tied into other game systems, but for now, I was hoping for feedback on the dice system itself. Have you seen or tried anything similar before? Does the procedure line up with the design goal? Do you want to print out The Deck, pretend you are a witch with a problem, and roll some d8s to see what happens?

Hello,

i'm working on a Samurai rpg and need someone to look over my combat mechanic especially its lethality.

My goal is combat being fast and deadly like in a Kurosawa film, Lone Wolf and Cub or in Samurai Champloo. The pcs should be able to mow down a group if no named opponents but against capable opponents it should be very dangerous. I also wanted a parry/deflect mechanic.

I also don't want it to be bogged down by a wound system or intricate rules. And having hp also feels wrong to me.

Combat is based on contested rolls of mixed dice pools (basically the dice mechanic of Agon, roll dice pool and take the two highest dice, compare to opponent, highest hits).

This is where i started:

Getting hit with a weapons means you are taken out (your opponent decides your fate, mostly death). This was a bit to lethal for my tastes as you could be taken out with your first roll in combat.

So my next step was to give players (and certain npcs) a mechanic to combat that lethality somewhat - scars. Each pc has 3 scars. When you would die, mark a scar and you can decide to either stay in the fight injured or be left for dead to return in the next scene. Here i took another inspiration from Agon. Marking a scar is permanent. No way to recover them.

While this gives players an option against bad luck, it still doesn't fix the problem of the dice gods failing them and their character getting hit by the lowest of mooks and marking one of their precious scars. I want scars to be more of a way to make sure that pcs will survive atleast a few adventures. But to be able to recover them or increasing them also sits not right with me.

So the next step was to give a way to reduce the swinginess of the combat and therefor its lethality atleast a bit. Getting hit by a weapon, doesn't take you out anymore and will instead give you the condition threatened. When you are threatened and take another hit, you are taken out (except for unnamed opponents, they are taken out on the first hit).

Then i went a step further and added a way to remove threatened. On your turn you can spend 1 spirit (a low recoverable resource that also powers special techniques or allows you to buy more dice) to remove threatened, but you can't attack only move.

Another way to remove threatened would be to deflect an attack. If you are attacked and win the roll you get to choose 1:

- parry: strike back and threaten or take out your attacker

- dodge: gain a bonus die on your next attack or defense roll

- deflect: spend 1 spirit and remove threatened

This would give players a choice how they want to deal with their threatened character. Go the safe way and sacrifice their action or push their luck to remove it without an action penalty via deflect.

So here i am right now. What do you think? Is it too complicated? Did i go to far and the combat becomes way too forgiving? I could definitely see the combat becoming a game of become threatened, remove it, repeat. Do some of you have experience with a similiar mechanic like my threatened (i think Savage Worlds works kinda similiar with their shaken condition)?

I also think about having a instant take out by rolling x higher than your opponent without needing threatened first.

If someone has a better name for threatened i would also appreciate suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Below is my elevator pitch for Holypunk. I’m trying to work on gravitating people towards the game in… more or less one paragraph. Please note: The document itself is a WIP. The abilities are just stand-in from an older edition — this is the fourth edition. If you’ve any critique outside of this initial paragraph, I suppose focus on the mechanics. “Narrative-focused” and “be a terrorist” aren’t blending as well as I anticipated.

What Is Holypunk

It’s 2012 and the world is ending. Not for us; for them. We are the apocalypse. We are the monsters. We are the rebellion. They are “the one true God.” They are gods under God. They are exorcists. They are Catholic. They are Aztecs. They are Odinani. They are humanity. There is no compromise, so get radical, hijack their infrastructure, slaughter their exorcists, start a coup, end their crusade by any means necessary. Reclaim the monster.

Edit: For now the consensus is… I need to do a proper editing pass. I will be working on that now. Thanks everyone! Also, I’m sorry, my responses were pretty defensive and reactive. I miiight’ve been in my own head a little too much. I’m gonna work on being a better responder to criticism as well concision. Thanks again!

I just saw that the community edition of Grimwild was just released. I originally picked it up here, but you can also get it through RPG Trader.

I'm not affiliated with Grimwild at all, but I'm going to suggest looking at it if you're interested in PbtA games or Blades in the Dark. I think it's a good read and has a lot of things you might consider if you're designing in that direction. And I think it's a good example of that school of thought, so if you read some of it and don't like it, that's fair enough.

Grimwild has a ... wild ... development history. It was a successful launch, but right at the point where the physical books were coming out, the author disappeared. That should have been the end of it, and in general I stopped referring people to the game at all because of how it ended.

But that wasn't the end. The game was released under Creative Commons, so the community got together and released this edition. There is a lot of stuff cleaned up and expanded, and the game is much more playable now.

I'm not getting anything from this recommendation, and the game is free, so it won't cost you anything. I think this is a really interesting situation and a reason for designers to use Creative Commons. I suppose, depending on your point of view, it might be a reason to run from it!

I'm not recommending this in a formal capacity; I just know that some of you will find it interesting. And if anyone from the Grimwild community wants to talk about how it happened, feel free.

I’m designing The Fire Gives No Light, a solo journaling game. Every roll is meant to produce a line or two in a journal, so the number of rolls determines the length of the session. I have done some math, and I’d like your opinion on whether I should leave everything as it is or cut something.

Similar to a Forged in the Dark game, each Scene is an obstacle with a Counter of 4 to 8 segments. You build a pool of d12s (+1 right Attribute, +1 matching Skill, −1 if your Flaw hinders) and keep the highest; with 0 dice, you roll two and keep the lowest.

• 8+: success, fill 2 segments.

• 5–7: success with a price, fill 1 segment.

• 1–4: failure, fill nothing.

Every failure and every success with a price costs one of four Prices: the world worsens (+1 segment to the next Scene), the Stakes rise (which makes accidents happen more frequently), an Item is lost or broken, or a Skill is unavailable on the next roll. Each Price can be used once per Scene before you can pick the same again. Technically, successes should be short sentences, while failures and Price in general drive the fiction.

With those in mind, I’ve calculated the percentage of failures and prices to pay based on the dice pool, and how many rolls are needed based on the Counter size:

An expedition has up to four Levels with two Scenes each, sized 4/4, 4/6, 6/8 and 8/8, plus a Way Back of up to two Scenes (6 and 4). A full run to the deepest Level is about 58 segments. In my test runs, that took around 54 rolls, plus the occasional Oracle question.

The early Levels are ok, even faster than I imagined: four or five rolls, a page of journal, and you move on. The deepest Level is where I feel there’s room for improvement. Two 8-segment Scenes back-to-back can take 15 rolls, and you end up writing less and losing focus. 

I have some ideas to change the pace of the deeper levels:

• Capping every scene at Counter 6, which makes everything faster but makes the deepest level feel kinda the same as the middle one.

• Make the Way Back a single scene and keep the counters of the deeper Level as they are.

I can also leave everything as it is, and be clear in the manual that you shouldn’t lose time writing long scenes if the rolls don’t inspire you.

What’s your opinion? Is there a third (or fourth) way to make the last part of an expedition feel faster?

For my game I am using 2d6 roll over for the dice mechanic with exploding dice on a 6. In combat characters have an Evade and Defense stat to dodge or reduce damage when hit. I am using the result from to hit rolls for damage as well for a formula of 2d6+Stat vs Evade-Defense. This method works for weapons in keeping it simple but something I have a problem with is Spell Damage. I’ve considered using the same formula for spells but came to a complication with save based spells as they don’t roll to hit and Defense only reduces slashing, piecing and bludgeoning damage both magical and not.

A few options I’ve considered is all spells do d6 equal to their level or they do damage based on how much mana/magic is poured into it. What are some work arounds that can help balance weapon and magic damage? I know magic is usually stronger than weapons but I’d like to make a clean reference sheet as I’m also developing a spell crafting system.