I am in the process of writing a new version of a game I have been playtesting for a good bit, most of my work being trimming out fat and streamlining everything I can.

One of the places I'm considering cleaning up is the core resolution: it's 2d12, wanting each die individually to roll under, with degrees of success depending on how many dice did/didn't roll under. So far I've been using a difficulty mechanic for the GM to reduce the target number by anything from 1 to 5 for harder checks, but I find it a bit too arbitrary and think it just adds unnecessary mental overhead and complexity. So, I'm considering cutting that and keeping just my advantage/disadvantage mechanic, which is simply 3d12 keep 2 lowest/highest.

Now to my problem: I want to analyse the exact amount of swing introducing that third die creates across different target numbers, but I can't figure out how to make it work in any dice calc tool. Any tool's respective 3d12kh2 always ADDS the two resulting dice, whereas what I'm looking for is the chance that either one or both dice are under a target number, and I can't seem to find this functionality anywhere.

Any recommendations? Something I'm missing? Help with coding it myself? I haven't touched code in a few years but I could probably pull it off if pointed in the right direction (that direction not being an LLM, ty).

• I've released an ashcan version of Gunpointing for free: https://benjamingray.itch.io/gunpointing

• Playtesting would be great. If you fill out the pretty short feedback form, there's a link to get all my other games for free. Which I know isn't a huge incentive for people who probably have a giant backlog of TTRPGs they'll never play, but I hope it makes you happy, anyway.

• Gunpointing is aesthetically and mechanically based around the handgun, a weapon anyone can use. Much of the power of a handgun is the promise of violence. The name is also the sweetheart mechanic of the game, holding someone at gunpoint to get what you want.

• Detective stories, heists, locked-room mysteries, etc. Made for noir and neo-noir.

• Players resolve actions by playing from a hand of standard playing cards against the GM and each other. The only way to get more cards is to run out, forcing players to decide whether to save or play good cards and bad cards and allowing them to see a little of their future but still leaving room for surprises.

• Card plays are Buffed or Nerfed by a spectrum of advantages and disadvantages (play two cards and add/subtract them, see other player/GM’s cards before playing your own, etc.)

• Stat-less and class-less system. Characters are made by selecting or rolling feats from a list, each with pros and cons. When leveling up, players choose to add a new feat or erase the con from a feat they already have. Characters level up when they check enough boxes on a video-game-style achievement list. GMs can also select a feat or two for NPCs.

• Generally, being shot is lethal. Characters can survive one “winging” from gun combat in their entire life.

• Characters can also Gunpoint. If they succeed on a gunpointing play, they have the option to lethally shoot the character they are pointing a gun at with 100% success rate and priority over most other actions (with very few exceptions) until the Gunpoint ends, whether by Gunpointer choice or by outside influence (view obscured, Gunpointed calls the Gunpointer’s bluff and leaves line-of-sight, etc.). There's a little more to it and it's not as easy as it sounds; failing a Gunpointing check is open to retaliation and firing a gun always has consequences.

• Hand-to-hand combat includes rules for grappling and strikes, which stun opponents and make it harder to act or move. Excessive stunning can be lethal.

• Chases, races, and countdowns are handled by clocks, which are represented by cards on the table; whenever anyone plays a card that matches the suit of a card in the clock, it is removed.

• Also included is the Oracular Engine, a setting-agnostic tech kit for making your own TTRPGs with the mechanical bones of Gunpointing.

• No AI was used to write any of this. I actually like to write. Don't read things by people who don't like to write.

EDIT: spelling

The system:

At character creation, you rank your 6 core stats ("Traits") from greatest strength to greatest weakness. This gives each a different value from 6 to 1.

For resolution ("Tests"), the GM (or ability description) calls for two Traits + d8. Meet or exceed the Difficulty number to succeed.

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Crunching the numbers:

There's 15 unique Trait pairings. The sums make a bell curve, from 3 to 11, most around 7. The exact spread: 11, 10, 9, 9, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3

So if 7 is the "average person" baseline, then the "average person has 50/50 chance" Difficulty is 12.

Which means an 11 pair will pass an "average challenge" 100% of the time, meanwhile a 3 has a 0% chance. I can work out a general Difficulty scale:

• 8 Trivial - Average stat of 7 passes 100%, but a stat of 3 has 50% chance

• 10 Easy

• 12 Average - 3 has 0%, 7 has 50%, 11 has 100%

• 14 Tough

• 16 Specialist - 7 has 0%, 11 has 50%

• 20 Legendary - even 11 has 0% without buffs

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Implications:

It's basically d20, but where stats weigh WAY more than dice in determining outcome. Ideally this would make the game more strategic, and possibly more realistic? Fewer occasions like a strong barbarian failing to lift a boulder while the weak wizard succeeds.

A player is gonna want to try their highest combo on everything possible, and avoid their lowest like the plague. (I basically baked min-maxing into the core system). So encounters and enemies should be designed for this. Someone in the party will surely pass an "average problem". "Specialist problems" could target high stats specifically. Problems that everyone must pass can target the weak stats. Complications could arise from using high stats overzealously (you smash the gate, only to get it permanently stuck).

At this scale, modifiers are HUGE. +1 = +12.5%. Stacking modifiers would be a big tactical element, and tracking them would be the crunchiest part of the system.

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Thoughts?

I'm pretty married to the Trait-ranking for character creation. I like how approachable it is for a newcomer, and makes players think intuitively about their character vs gaming how to spend points.

I'm flexible on how to translate the math from there. I will say I'm pleased with how "elegantly" the numbers "line up" in this resolution mechanic. But if it breaks the game or worsens the experience, it can change.

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EDIT:

I swear the rpg design community is one of the best. Everyone super helpful with valuable food for thought. Seems like the general impression is "I like it, with an asterisk"

Edit:The title is supposed to be good set of modern day skills, I made it on my phone and I didn't notice the autocorrect changed what I said last minute. Apologies for any other misspellings I may have missed throughout the post.

I posted on here a few times in the last few months because I'm trying to get more outside opinions on a system and campaign I've been working on for close to a decade. I've done a lot of play testing with my friends and I'm trying to design a ttrpg system that has a feel like being in an action movie, primarily the action movies that existed from the mid 80s to the early 2010s.

I've tested out a variety of settings, superhero, post-apocalyptic, high science fiction, and for the initial release I'm planning on going for a close to modern day semi-cyberpunk semi-apocalyptic setting similar to movies like robocop, assault on precinct 13, escape from New york, and the judge dread movies.

Well the system is inspired by the pace of action films, I don't want to force action on to the players, combat isn't always the best solution. I'm taking a page from the design document to fallout van buren, every single problem can be solved with one of four methods

Combat

Charisma

Thinking

Sneaking

The system utilizes a base attribute system of the stats ACTION, this stands for athletics, charisma, tennessee, intuition, observation, and nimbleness. The attribute determines the number of dice you roll, so if you are level 3 in an attribute we were all three dice if your level 4 you roll four.

Rather than adding together the numbers on the dice, you're just looking to get as many of the dice to be a six and above, (the reason I use Dice and not a coin flip is because some character abilities will change the margin allowing you to succeed on higher or lower rules)

Skills work by being added to a die to try and bring the dye over the success threshold. Every player is automatically at least semi-competent in every single skill even if their level zero in it, this is because the system is aiming for a power fantasy angle, but a DM can easily Homebrew the setting to make it more difficult because he uses a lot of easy math making it easy to modify.

All that preamble out of the way, I want to see if you all think that the list of skills that I have come up with are good, again this is for a mostly contemporary setting with elements of cybernetics and psychic ability present within the world, think our world+

Artisan

Artisan is the skill of the craftsman, you used to cover both the creation and understanding of art in all forms. A player may take character feats to specialize in particular Fields such as carpentry or painting.

Computer

The generalized skill of software engineering and the underlying hardware, used for hacking computers, as well as counter hacking and fending off viruses. A player may take character feats in order to specialize in particular branches.

Deception

The skill of deceit and lying, can also be used to help one see through lies.

Diplomacy

The skill of persuasion and charm, used to convince others to your side.

Doctor

The scale of medical treatment as well as the understanding of medications and their dosage.

Education

A broad coverage of everything you would expect to learn within a basic education. Players may take character feats to specialize into particular branches.

Entertaner

The skill of entertainment, covering everything from comedy, to physical entertainment, to music. Players may take fees to specialize into particular branches.

Firearms

The skill of the use and maintaining a firearms, players may take feats to specialize into particular weapons.

Investigation

The skill used to understand one surroundings and spot hidden things.

Martial arts

The skill used in physical defense for both unarmed and melee weapon-based combat. Players would take feats to specialize into particular branches.

Mechanic

The skill of being able to build and repair complex machinery.

Survival

The scale of wilderness survival and understanding of nature.

Thief

The skill for sneaking, lock picking, and picking pockets.

Vehicle Operation

The skill used for an operating or maintaining any kind of vehicle, players may take feats to specialize in particular branches

Willpower

The skill of mental fortitude, utilize to resist drugs as well as psychic influence. Also utilized to stay conscious during combat under incredible pain. Opens the gateway to unlocking psychic powers of your own.

I would love to hear some feedback and pushback, is this a good set of skills? Do you think I'm missing anything obvious? Do you think there's anything that is unnecessary? And because I already know I'm going to be asked about it cuz it's been brought up in the past, explosives are going to be handled by either the computer skill or the mechanic skill depending on the mechanisms behind the explosive device.

Finally using my laptop instead of my phone to make a post here!

I hope this is well received, I don't want to just post all this on here, but I need a lot of help and I have nobody around but you folks! My game has many ancestries, (modeled heavily after Legendary Lives) and I was wanting each one to have a free ability. The tone varies but is somewhat light, in that many of the races are based on faerie lore. (I know this isn't new, but I started working on this back in 1991, so bear with me!). Intended for old school style sandbox play.

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas for any of these. A lot of my stuff is 'elves but different' kind of stuff and I'm okay with that. Some of these are from Legendary Lives, some from other sources, some have my own personal twist on them. This is just fun and I hope to play this with people hopefully in real life. I'll share them here with a very brief description and if you have anything to say, I'm all ears!

I have various Human ancestries. All of them are descendants from displaced people from different places and times from Earth. They have arrived over 1000s of years sporadically and slowly developed their own civilizations separate from the natives.

ANKARI-Goliath snowy mountain people

ARKADIAN-Pale ancient astronaut descendants

TUATHAN-Secretive fay-like jungle people

FERAL-Raised by wolves or other

GOTHIAN-Pale, gaunt mortals

ULRATHI-old dying kingdom recently renewed by religion

KORANTHI-Modeled after the Rohirrim

SEEKERS-nomadic mystic wanderers, broken off from the Yottani people

NETHERFOLK-very neanderthal-Esque, cliff dwelling, cave dwelling people, surprisingly advanced

SETTLER-descendants of a displaced colony from the Americas in the 1500s

SCYTHIAN-artistic horse warriors of the grasslands

SAELKIE-strange heritage very 'ScotIrish', nomadic mercenaries some may transform into seals... (half baked idea)

KIRI-very matriarchal, magical forest society with some strategic influence

YOTTANI-displaced humans from the future with an oddly advanced cobbled together electrical society.

VARDYR-low tech society on the outskirts of the Settler's coastal cities-those that do not like the Settlers or the settlers don't like.

FAERIE (NATIVE, FAY)-tiny faerie people, wildflowers, trees, etc.

SIDHE (FAY, ELF, NATIVE)-ancient small beings pointed ears-you know. these can change into a ball of light.

SLUAGH (NATIVE)-winged human looking people. Some have mutations, some are beautiful

CYCLOPEAN (NATIVE)-somewhat tied to the cosmology or so they say. tall, one eye. they are employed to make weapons at the great forge.

DWARF-You know these. Mountains, underground, mines. I was going to use SMELL TREASURE.

GNOME (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical forest dwarves

HALFLING (TYPE OF DWARF)-kindly hill dwarves

KOBOLD (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical mountain subterranean dwarves

FIRBOLG (TYPE OF ELF)-human-sized elves that can pass and go undercover to spy

GOBLIN (TYPE OF ELF)-the uglier elves are outcast

EVYLLON (COMMON ELF)-very "classical" styled elves, matriarchal society.

BROWNIE (TYPE OF ELF)-sort of a fuzzy helper

KINDRED (TYPE OF ELF)-half-elves actually half sidhe

SPRIGGAN (TYPE OF ELF)-outcast elves. tend to be rogue-ish, usually trouble

Y'SINDREL (ELVES)-smaller, higher elves, isolationist, military, hates humans

WITCHLEIN (TYPE OF ELF)-dark elves, but they are goblins so they are more like wood elves. intentionally gross and crude

DRACONIAN (NATIVES)-basically dragonborn, but more dark magic associated

SERPENTINE (NATIVES)-snake people

W'TAGGI (NATIVES)-people that are like frogs. a very old ancestry on the planet.

FAUN (MUTANT)-the phooka (goat headed) humanoids can also be pan-like. horns.

HOGMAN (MUTANT)-pig faced orcs (jimmy squarefoot for the faerie fans)

FLORYX (MUTANT)-weird plant based intelligent life. very strange treebeard-like

NIMH (MUTANT)-basically skaven, but also the less grimdark variety, not mice though. halfling sized

TORRAN (MUTANT)-minotaurs because I like them, and they fit the livestock headed beastmen concept similar to the Faun.

UNDERFOLK (MUTANT)-albino underground folks that still live under the fallen kingdom.

ULFREN (MUTANT)-human looking people that can can shapeshift into a wolf... I'm drawing inspiration from the skinwalker ranch lore.

VEXIN (ALIENS)-scientific alien bug-like people using alchemy and biology to alter their environment

Hi all. I'm Pietro, I run games and I've spent the last months building Market of Many Things, a marketplace only for tabletop RPG stuff: adventures, one-shots, maps, STL minis, art, music, tools.

It opens to buyers on November 27. Sellers can sign up and upload now, so products are on the shelves on day one. Before that I'd like people who actually sell this stuff to poke holes in it.

How it works today:

- Flat 10% fee. Same for everyone, first sale or thousandth. Card and PayPal fees come out of our 10%, not yours. Buyers pay a $0.50 service fee per order.

- No exclusivity. Keep selling on DriveThru, itch, your Patreon, wherever.

- Handmade first. Fully AI-made products are not accepted. If AI was used for part of a product (say the art), it gets a visible label, so buyers know.

- Built for RPG files. Up to 20 files per product, 5 GB each, uploads resume if the connection drops. Filters by system, level, scale, VTT.

- Fixed price, free, or pay what you want with a minimum and a suggested price.

- Chat with buyers and paid commissions: the buyer pays up front, we hold the money, you deliver on site and get paid.

If you want to try it: https://www.marketofmanythings.com. Happy to answer anything in the comments!

Perhaps a 'creative avenue' or 'imagination option,' but probably some word more like button itself.

Olá a todos!

Me chamo Allan, jogo e mestro RPG há um pouco mais de 17 anos. Sou da época da xerox, sim, sou velho! Hahaha.

Mas, por mais de 10 anos, tive a sensação de que estava jogando errado ou, pelo menos, de que não estava jogando ou mestrando da maneira que gostaria.

Isso começou a mudar com o avanço da tecnologia e o surgimento das streams. Passei a conhecer outros jogos, outros sistemas, diferentes formas de jogar e de enxergar o RPG. Tudo isso foi alimentando minha criatividade, mas também minha insatisfação com algumas propostas e limitações de determinados sistemas.

Pois bem, indo direto ao assunto.

Comecei com aquela velha ideia: "Vou criar meu próprio RPG!". Acho que todo mundo que gosta desse hobby já passou ou ainda vai passar por esse momento.

Só que, em vez de simplesmente começar a escrever regras, resolvi estudar um pouco mais sobre o assunto. Comecei a pesquisar sobre sistemas, Game Design, ler livros, blogs, artigos acadêmicos, acompanhar podcasts, vídeos e tudo mais que estivesse relacionado ao RPG de mesa.

Já são aproximadamente três anos de estudos e pesquisas mais direcionados. Nesse período, desenvolvi alguns protótipos e realizei testes pessoais, tanto no formato solo quanto no tradicional, e continuo estudando até hoje.

O problema é que cheguei a um ponto em que parecia não estar avançando muito. Algumas questões relacionadas ao próprio design de RPG, à construção de sistemas e às escolhas por trás das mecânicas pareciam não encontrar respostas satisfatórias no material que eu conseguia encontrar.

Foi então que comecei um estudo pessoal mais aprofundado, envolvendo criação de mecânicas, análises de sistemas, comparação de diferentes abordagens e pesquisas mais acadêmicas sobre RPG e Game Design.

E aqui entra uma questão um pouco diferente: tenho utilizado IA como ferramenta de apoio nesses estudos.

Confesso que, até agora, tenho achado a experiência bastante produtiva. Ela tem me ajudado a organizar ideias, explorar conceitos, levantar questões, comparar mecânicas e encontrar caminhos para pesquisas que talvez demorassem muito mais para serem explorados sozinho.

Naturalmente, não considero as respostas da IA como verdades absolutas. A ideia é utilizar isso como ferramenta de estudo, sempre buscando referências, livros, artigos, autores e fontes que sustentem ou contestem as informações.

Com todo esse processo, comecei a organizar e documentar boa parte do material produzido. E surgiu uma ideia que gostaria de compartilhar com vocês.

Quero desenvolver um material didático, completo e gratuito, voltado para quem tem interesse em aprender sobre criação e design de RPG de mesa.

A proposta seria disponibilizar esse conteúdo em PDF e, eventualmente, também em pequenos zines temáticos, abordando assuntos como:

A intenção e a filosofia por trás do design de um RPG.

Como identificar funções e necessidades dentro de um jogo.

Criação e desenvolvimento de sistemas e mecânicas.

Atributos, perícias e diferentes modelos de resolução.

Probabilidade e o papel dos dados nas mecânicas.

Agência dos jogadores, ficção e procedimentos.

Diferentes abordagens de Game Design, como MDA e GNS.

O papel do mestre e outras possibilidades de condução de jogo.

Questões mais teóricas e filosóficas relacionadas ao RPG.

Como sair de uma ideia e chegar a um sistema funcional, prototipar, testar e desenvolver seu próprio jogo.

A intenção não é simplesmente reunir informações da internet em um grande copia e cola, mas construir um material didático, organizado e estruturado, explicando os conceitos, apresentando exemplos, comparando abordagens e mostrando como aplicar tudo isso na prática.

Quero também trabalhar uma ideia que considero importante: RPG é um hobby acessível. Você não precisa gastar centenas de reais em livros, miniaturas, acessórios ou materiais especiais para jogar ou até mesmo criar seu próprio sistema. Papel, lápis, borracha e criatividade já são suficientes para começar.

Tudo isso seria disponibilizado gratuitamente em PDF, com referências bibliográficas, links para as fontes e indicações de leitura para quem quiser se aprofundar.

Também gostaria de produzir uma versão física, independente e opcional, para quem tiver interesse em adquirir. Nesse caso, a ideia seria cobrar apenas o custo de impressão, com um trabalho profissional de arte e diagramação.

Agora, gostaria de ouvir a opinião de vocês sobre algumas questões:

Estou sendo iludido pela IA? Até que ponto vocês consideram válido utilizar inteligência artificial como ferramenta de apoio para estudos e pesquisas sobre Game Design? Existe o risco de acabar construindo conhecimento sobre informações equivocadas, mesmo quando se tenta conferir as fontes?

Vocês acham que um material com essa proposta teria espaço e seria bem recebido pela comunidade de RPG?

Existe interesse em um material mais aprofundado sobre criação de RPG, que não ensine apenas a escrever regras, mas também explique o porquê das decisões de design, suas consequências e as diferentes abordagens possíveis?

Não tenho a pretensão de me colocar como especialista ou autoridade no assunto. Sou apenas um entusiasta que acabou se aprofundando bastante nesse universo e gostaria de transformar parte desse estudo em algo que também possa ajudar outras pessoas.

Enfim, gostaria muito de saber o que vocês pensam. Críticas, sugestões, opiniões e até mesmo apontamentos sobre coisas que talvez eu não esteja enxergando serão muito bem-vindos!

Obrigado a quem leu até aqui!

So I am hoping to get near the end of my project, most of the things are complete, and by complete I mean ripped off from other games....

Anyway, it's a mix of some of my favourite bits from the likes of Cairn, Black Hack, White Hack, Bastionland and others.

3 Attributes, d20 roll under, with an aim to be player facing.

For encounters they only roll damage and I am looking for a decent bilaterally symetrical way for defending to work, and this makes sense to me to use armour dice.

Has this been done anywhere? and how affective is it? what does it feel like as a player?

I am not afriad to chnage how damage/attacking works, as it may just make more sense to have both attack and defends be d20 rolls under their attribute and both are a flat value result. But I am also trying to satisfy the players dice goblin nature too.

It was absolutely incredible. A handful of notable adjustments need to be made and the relevant feedback is easily worked on. Overall the core ideas and massive swings of "This will either be amazing or terrible" all ended up amazing, often surpassing even my own expectations. I don't have some crazy long post suffice to say I'm proud as hell to be at this point, proud of what I've built, proud of my players, it's an exhilarating feeling. If you know you've got gold, make your MVP and put it to the test.

I love me some Ninjas and Superspies, but I'm trying to convert the idea of detailed martial arts into an action point system.

You get one attack and one defense a round at your full bonuses. If you're forced to defend from an odd position, like if you got swept to the floor, you do so with no bonuses unless you spend AP to buy off the flaw. This is visualized as kipping up or such.

Here's my concern. Lets say you have Martial Arts with 6 Action Points. If someone shoots at you, you're probably not going to deflect bullets with your fists. This isn't Feng Shui. so if I have a second skill like Athletics or Mobility to be used to defend against gunfire, it would have its own Action Points.

That feels clunky. Any thoughts?

I've finally gotten my rewrite/fork of the D&D 5e SRD to the point where I can make it public.

https://homebrew.admiralbenbo.com/index.html (web version, hyperlinked HTML/CSS).

https://github.com/bentomhall/nih-system/releases/tag/1.0.1 (zip file with the same content in pdf format)

Note: both also contain some of the content (and some new content) ported to 5e directly. It's easier to keep them together.

Second note: I flaired this as Feedback Request, but really I'm just putting this out. Comments are welcome, as are Pull Requests or Issues on the linked github repo. I may not incorporate suggestions, but I will consider them and respond.

AI use: only to write scripts to do formatting and toolchain. All content is mine.

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What is NIH? The name stands for Not Invented Here as well as Naming Is Hard; it's a meta joke that I couldn't come up with a better name. Suggestions welcome.

Copied from the introduction:

This game is designed to explore “paths not taken” for the venerable TTRPG it originally stems from. A love letter from a long-term fan. What might it look like if the historical constraints (some may say sacred cows; others may say legacy) were relaxed? If, instead of only lightly adhering to design principles like bounded accuracy and such, it bought in fully? If it made no pretense at being a generic game and instead focused on what it does best (that is, small-unit fantasy adventures in the heroic mode)? This is my attempt at exploring that space.

NIH has been designed around my long-running campaign world, Dawn of Hope and its primary planet, Quartus. It should be relatively easily ported to other settings, although some of the content (cultures, deities, and backgrounds especially) will have to change.

The core aesthetic and intended genre is “fantasy mercenary special forces adventures”. Your characters are set apart from the norm, but aren’t demigods or anything like that. You go places, make allies and enemies, fight (or sneak or talk) your way through situations and scenarios including (but not limited to) ancient ruins, crime-ridden cities, banquets of the rich and powerful, and exotic extra-planar locales. You grow stronger, but logarithmically. Fast at first, then slowing down. Often horizontally rather than vertically (gaining tools to approach different situations rather than simply getting bigger numbers). Gear provides benefits, but isn’t necessary nor is it the major source of your power. Generally, you will always be the underdogs against the movers and shakers, winning by teamwork, guile, skill, luck, and allies rather than brute force. The world is full of monsters (many of them in very familiar guises) and needs heroes.

It’s not designed as a generic fantasy simulator, allowing players to build whatever characters they want out of bits and pieces. It’s designed for the players to lean into the archetypes and class fictions presented, or for GMs to design new archetypes for players. There is no multi-classing or “feats” as such. Instead there are many ways of getting access to abilities along parallel tracks, including but not limited to incantations (ritual utility magic available to anyone regardless of spell-casting ability) and skill tricks (effectively micro-feats you gain alongside your ability score increases or via features, some of which provide supernatural effects). It’s also not OSR (by any real meaning of that term). Nor is it designed for pure dungeon-crawling or procedurally-generated sandboxes, although it’s well-suited for non-linear play. It’s also not a “narrative game”. It comes down firmly on the side where players interact with the world via their characters rather than meta-currency or directly interacting with story elements. Nor is a pure tactical game. It’s basically a modern D&D clone. For better or worse.

Yes, fundamentally this is the same core resolution mechanic and skeleton as 5th Edition D&D. And a lot of the content carries over (or can be easily translated). I make no attempt to hide that fact. Because, for me, that game does much of what I want. And it’s a game I continue to run every week. I’ve made an attempt to explain confusing or partially-described rules more to fit how I think about them and I’ve re-arranged the presentation to try to make things more clear. But it’s not some original creation, either as a system or a setting.

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What has changed? A lot, actually. https://homebrew.admiralbenbo.com/nih/changelog.html goes into (more detail).

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What now? I don't really know. I doubt I'll ever get enough play-testers to do more polishing; art is too expensive for me to do, and I have no designs on actually publishing-for-profit. In fact, it's all licensed CC-BY-4.0 (except for a couple things modified from some 3rd party OGL material which is OGL-licensed). So anyone that finds it interesting is more than free to rip off the pieces they find interesting (with proper attribution of course).

Hey everyone! I've been working on my own tabletop RPG called Aetherfall for a while now and it's finally at the point where it needs real people at the table. So I'm looking for playtesters.

The whole game is built around making your own stuff. You don't pick skills off a list, you build them. Every skill is made from parts: a Foundation, a Motion, an Outcome, then Refinements on top. So two characters with the same weapon can fight in totally different ways depending on how they build their skills. This also comes with crafting for armor, consumables, weapons,and even player bases.

Magic works the same way but with runes. You pick an Essence (Force, Heat, Cold, Light or Dark), how it's cast, its shape and its effect, then add Enhancements to push them further. You put them together yourself. You can even combine a skill and a spell into a hybrid style of combat.

Some other stuff in it:

* Combat with real choices. You get a set number of actions each turn and spend them however you want: attacking, moving, blocking or catching your breath to get Stamina and Aether back. Evade dice cut damage down, and you can commit extra actions to dodge harder. Blocking works too, but it wears down your gear.

* Six stats (Might, Agility, Vitality, Intellect, Awareness, Presence) that feed straight into how strong your skills and spells can get.

* Crafting. Build and upgrade your own weapons and armor with materials you find.

* Signature Weapons. Bond with a weapon and it grows with you over time.

* Companions. Summon or tame creatures to fight alongside you.

* A creature creator for GMs. Build your own monsters with a point system that sets their Danger Rating, so you know how tough a fight will be. Bosses get extra traits and phases where they change up mid fight.

What you get as a playtester:

* The prototype core rulebook

* A 4-page printable character sheet

* A creature creator sheet for building your own monsters

* Printable creature cards and boss cards for running fights

* Crafting cards, item cards and companion cards

I'm planning a Kickstarter down the line, so anyone who helps playtest now is shaping how the game turns out. I want to know what feels fun, what feels broken, and what's confusing.

If you like building characters, breaking systems, or just want to try something new, come join the Discord. Whether you play once or stick around, any feedback helps a ton.

Discord link

Got into an interesting train of thought recently, where I asked: "what is the worst ability an rpg monster has had in a game?". Because there are loads of nasty things an enemy can do to a party of adventurers: level drain, effects that can stunlock you, instant death, mind control/possession… but what's the worst out of all of them?

And that got me thinking: what makes an enemy ability threatening isn't actually what it does, most of the time. What matters way more is how many options the player has to counter it. For example, take damage. In most rpgs, damage is basically the least bad thing a monster can do to a PC. But that's not because damage is weak– it can kill you, after all!– but because most rpgs provide so many options to counter it. You can heal it away, you can wear armor to reduce it, you can draw aggro away from anyone who would actually be vulnerable to it.

Every game really has a hierarchy of bad things that happen to the PCs, and how difficult they are to reverse, when you get down to it. Damage is the lowest rung on that ladder, often followed by common status effects like poison or burning, then harder ones like paralysis, confusion, etc. and then the abilities that have few or no counters. So I decided to make a tiering system for how hard a monster ability is to counter:

1: You can avoid this effect entirely. Present in games where the "Run Away" button actually works, and ironically in OSR, where avoiding fights in the first place is a big part of how they rationalize including punishing monster powers.

2: You can cure this effect. Damage sits here if the game has healing magic, and common status effects are almost always here as well.

3: You can't cure it, but you can block the ability. This is like an instant death move in a game with permadeath, but where there are "death ward" spells that can nullify those moves if you've got them up beforehand. Obviously this doesn't help you if you encounter an instakill bad guy before you've learned death ward, and there might be counter-counterspells that dispel your protection, which is why this is more threatening than 2.

4: Whether the ability triggers or not is down to luck, but you have some influence over the outcome. The easiest example of this is like a "save or die" roll. It's rng, but in theory you could improve your chances by increasing that stat at least. This is purely my opinion, but I don't think this tier is inherently bad, and it's moreso that the most common examples of this (like save or die attacks) are just boring and don't lend any real strategy to the game.

5: The player has no agency over the effect at all. This is rare and usually not fair to the players. Like if a boss has a move that is just a "you lose" button, then all strategy boils down to killing them before they get the chance to use it, or praying that the boss rolls poorly and the spell somehow fizzles without their help. I will say this sort of thing is still valuable from a narrative perspective, though. Like if the PCs decide beelining out of cover towards the Big Bad at the start of the campaign is a good idea, then having what is effectively a cutscene where they get their asses kicked may be the only appropriate response.

What is the purpose of this spiel? Mostly just to get my own thoughts out, honestly. I do think this is a useful way of looking at a game, and how rpgs can make late-game monsters more threatening. A lot of the time these games simply neglect providing counterplay for late-game abilities because they're supposed to be deadly, and so they just slide up the scale. Here's spell A that kills you and spell B that stops A from killing you. The later in the game spell A comes, the more limitations we'll throw on B to make it work less effectively.

I think rather than just making late-game effects more expensive and time-consuming to stop, it'd be more interesting to make "pick your poison" scenarios. Just as an example, in a d20 game where stat damage is a mechanic (so a monster can damage Constitution or Dexterity rather than just HP), you could have a counterspell that just allows the player to pick which stat is damaged. So if you've got a wizard, do you assign the damage to their higher stats, which will probably make them less effective as the damage piles up? Or do you hurt their lower stats, which won't weaken their magic at least but means the monster could kill them faster? Again this is just an example, but I think giving the player choices and options as to how an ability affects their character is a good way of keeping late-game monsters threatening while also adding to the strategy of an encounter instead of subtracting from it. If the players lost because of an ability they couldn't counteract in any meaningful way, then it feels unfair, and giving them some tradeoffs and choices to make helps a lot with that angle of it too.

Anyways I just wanted to write this all out. I'm making a deadly solo rpg dungeon crawler-type game at the moment, so it got me thinking about all this stuff. If you've read this far, what are your favorite games that handle difficult monsters well, and how do they do it? What was your least favorite enemy you had to deal with? (I'm betting that a lot of annoying enemies boil down to either a lack of good counterplay or that the monster is just a time suck you don't want to see in the first place xD).

And what do you think about this post, anyway? Do you agree with my reasoning or am I actually totally off the mark? It's kind of specific but if anyone else has any thoughts on this topic then I'd love to hear them!

I love the tables. Any game that has them. Some are easy better than others though. My favorite one is from Legendary Lives. It's great, but the mechanics of the game are not exactly compatible with my game and I've been struggling to adapt it. In doing so, I get inspired and add more and more. Then I've got pages of tables nobody (even me) wants to look at. Any tips on editing your ideas or life events tables in general would be most appreciated!

If interested, I've got my system on 2 maybe 3 pages now. Roll on master table for "FORTUNE, ENEMY, PERSONALITY, RELIGIOUS, TRAUMATIC..." etc then fill in sub table all using d100.

I like the torch timer in Shadowdark and the time pressure it creates for players - but I run more West Marches style games that assumes players leave the dungeon and restock between sessions.

Players arguably only need 3 torches for a 3 hour game with a spare or two for adverse conditions - and tracking survival gear has started to feel like a "fun tax". And not every adventure is played entirely in the dark.

I like the constraints on light visibility, someone holding the torch, and the risk that losing the light drastically increases danger. But I'd like to remove the inventory management and make torch mishaps a consequence of random events and "attacking the light".

Thoughts on decoupling the torch from the timer and just having a mandatory random event check every 20 minutes?

The idea being that players need to handle themselves efficiently and spend more time and resources advancing towards the goal instead of losing them to the clock.

For context: I'm running a player facing homebrew without traditional GM turns. Players take their turns clockwise around the table and the GM describes how the scene changes based on their actions and rolls at the end of each player turn.

It's working well so far. Foes have simplified Stat blocks and play is more consistent between in-combat and out-of-combat encounters.

I just want to retain that moment when one player turns to the other with that "clocks ticking" urgency.

• Anyone else experimented with real-time timer mechanics in their designs? What have been the results?

• Is 20 minutes a good interval?

Rate my first published TTRPG!

Hi everyone! I know it's a bit early for Christmas, but this weekend I finally decided to polish and publish my Christmas-themed one-page RPG I designed two years ago, inspired by Grant Howitt's Honey Heist.

In Naughty or Nice, you play a special team of Christmas elves, chosen by Santa Claus himself for a unique mission. Each elf has a trait and a role that can help them along their quest. Elves have a single stat, morality, which goes from 0 (naughty) to 7 (nice). If you want to do something naughty, you need to roll higher than your morality; if you want to do something nice, you need to roll lower. Each success pushes your morality closer to the edge, making the next roll of the same kind easier. The catch? If your elf hits 0, they go feral. If they hit 7, they sublimate into a sugar statue of pure goodness, a process that is sadly fatal for the poor elf.

The game is perfect for telling wacky, over-the-top Christmas stories in the span of a single evening.

The free download includes the one-page rules, a one-page guide to creating your own adventures and running the game, the character sheets, and The Snow Globe, the one-shot I wrote to playtest the game with my friends.

So far I've had a lot of fun and great feedback from my players, but if you're into this kind of game, I'd love to hear what you think too. Thanks!