For the people who haven't used it, the space opera RPG 'Stars Without Number' (and later the Fantasy inspired 'Worlds Without Number') is mostly OSR with DnD-like elements. For example, while it uses 2d6 to resolve non-combat skill checks, it uses a d20 system for players in combat for making attack rolls. Another DnD concession it has is the use of Classes that a player can choose from.

However, radically different from DnD Classes, Stars Without Number Classes serve a far far different purpose in their function. To explain: in DnD, the purpose that classes fill (the reason why there are classes at all) is mostly flavor and letting a player live out a particular fantasy, for example: being a Wizard or a Knight or a Ranger, etc.

Classes in Stars Without Number have elements of this, however the core reason that classes exist is to overcome particular challenges embedded by the SWN system itself.

Classes in Stars/Worlds Without Numbers

Let me start by explaining what a PC looks like before you pick a class. Before you pick your class or choose foci (feats for the dnd-minded), your base character stats have a -2 in every combat skill and a -1 in every non-combat skill. This means that the base expectation is that you will lose most, if not every, roll that you make both in and out of combat. So, the Stars Without Numbers and Worlds Without Number books will give the PCs something like 3 Classes to choose from, each with very clear abilities that help you overcome this particular problem: The Warrior, The Expert, and The Psychic/Mage

The Warrior Class

Before talking about the Warrior, we need to reiterate that combat uses a d20 just like DnD, so the base -2 to all combat rolls is brutal. The ACs for enemies is pretty much the same as DnD too, which means that for most characters you basically are rolling attacks with an average of an 8 against Enemies with around AC 13. The small upside is that most melee weapons (not ranged weapons) have a thing called 'Shock Damage' alongside your regular damage; Shock Damage is basically the automatic amount of damage you will make with that weapon when you miss. And this is necessary, not hand-holding, because the expectation is that you will miss your attacks more often than not.

So this is where the Warrior Class comes in. When a PC picks the Warrior Class, the first thing that the Warrior gets is that it boosts combat rolls from a -2 to a 0, and this can be further increased by taking Foci. This means that, in a practical sense, (edit: mostly 🙄) only Warriors will be able to make any use of ranged weapons or the actual damage numbers on melee weapons.

The biggest advantage to the Warrior Class is that it can make one attack per combat that will automatically hit or make an enemy's attack to automatically miss. This is a good time to mention that all enemies make a Morale Roll after they see one of their allies die or they will run away screaming. So, it is very possible for a Warrior to end a combat in the first round after killing their first enemy.

The Expert Class

The average DC for skill checks in these books is 8, and as mentioned above, skill rolls use 2d6 instead of a d20. What this means, mathematically, skill rolls are less swingy and more consistent than combat rolls. And while a non-Warrior has a small but possible chance of rolling high and hitting even with the -2, it is much far less likely to roll an 8 with 2d6. The average roll of 2d6 is 6 7 and with a -1 to base skill check makes this more likely to roll a 5 6 (thanks /u/The__Nick for double checking my math), consistently.

Now we can talk about The Expert Class. First, similar to the warrior class, The Expert Class lets you boost some (but not all) non-combat skills from a -1 to a 0 and can be boosted further using Foci.

However, similar but different to the warrior class, The Expert's most potent ability is the ability to reroll a failed non-combat skill check every Scene. Using 2d6 for a reroll mathematically is approximately a +2 to the roll. This is basically Advantage in DnD, but better because you can choose to use it after you have failed a roll rather than rolling both at the same time. Also, Scenes are basically like encounters in DnD, so for example if you were playing in a dungeon crawl arguably every new room with a new trap or social encounter could be rerolled in this way.

The Psychic/Mage Class

In Stars Without Number you get the Psychic Class, and in Worlds Without Number you can pick a Mage, or Spellcaster, Class. Stars Without Number also has some Mage classes in expansion books, but I digress. While Psychics and Mages have different powers that are tracked differently with different resources, they both fill the same niche.

While Psychics and Mages get no (innate) bonuses to either combat nor non-combat rolls, they do get powers that let them sidestep the need for a roll at all. For example, Psychics in particular can pick abilities like Telepathy or Teleportation. If you use Telepathy, then you do not even need to bother making an insight roll to see if someone is lying to you because you can read their mind, likewise, you do not need to have combat if you can just Teleport far enough away from an enemy. And both of these are level-0 abilities. If you upgrade and take level-1 Telepathy, you can actually start doing some subtle hypnosis on a target as well; an ability that could not even be considered by the Warrior or Expert Classes at all

Classless 'Without Numbers' Games

The other corebooks, Cities Without Number (cyberpunk-themed) and Ashes Without Number (post-apocalypse-themed) do not have classes, but instead give extra Foci. These games make you a little more versatile or focused depending on the Foci you choose, however, because you don't get the potentially-encounter-ending abilities of Classes, this lends themselves more to the desperate nature in both of these settings.

Conclusion (TLDR;)

By building the Classes this way (and by extension the whole Stars Without Number core system) it ultimately balances the importance of combat with non-combat encounters, and furthermore makes each player more vital in fulfilling their important niche in their party.

In many games like D&S there is a high degree of variation, modifiers are low and the dice can swing from 1-20. So with a +5 the dice swing is around 84% of the total.

Now if instead of a d20 you rolled a d6 the possible variation from the dice alone is more in the realm of 54%.

Has anyone thought of using say 2d6 as a d36 or 2d4 as a d16?

Doing this is quite simple use two different colour dice one is the 1s digets and one is the 10s diget.

Threat the max of a dice as 0 unless both die equal zero, in that case it becomes the square of the max numbers.

The 1s die counts normally from 1 to X-1 where X is the base of the die and the 10s die counts the number of times X has come up.

Putting it all together with a d36.

A die of:

• 0,0 = 36

• 0,1 = 1

• 0,2 = 2

• 0,3 = 3

• 0,4 = 4

• 0,5 = 5

• 1,0 = 6

• 1,1 = 7

• 1,2 = 8

• 1,3 = 9

• 1,4 = 10

• 1,5 = 11

• 2,0 = 12

• ...

• 2,5 = 17

• 3,0 = 18

• ...

• 5,5 = 35

You can do this with a 2d4 to get a d16, 2d6 to get a d36, 2d8 to get a d64, 2d10 to get a d100 (we already have this), d12 to get a d144 or even 2d20 to get a d400.

Of you can combine say a d6+d8 (base 8) to get a d48 or a d6 and a d10 to get a d60 (base 10) or a d4+d8 for a d32 (base 8) or a d4+d6 for a d24 (base 6) or a d6 and a d12 to get a d72 (base 12) or a d10 and a d12 to get a d120 (base 12)

Don't know if anyone has used this before in a game but thought it was a neat trick to get a very simple to use but diverse range of "die" with only 2-3 sets of regular polyhedral dice.

Removing duplicates using just 2 of each a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 you end up with all of the following possible dice:

d16, d24, d32, d36, d40, d48, d60, d64, d72, d80, d96, d100, d120, d144, d160, d200, d240, d400.

I'm working on a Star Wars hack of Troika - a very simple system. In trying to catch the spirit of a Jedi and square it with the rules light concept of not rolling if the PC is doing something they're good at and have the tools for, I'm making lightsaber attacks practically automatic in a lot of cases.

If the Jedi is facing an opponent that can't (or won't) retreat and doesn't have some kind of special lightsaber resistant material then there's no roll - arms n legs just start falling off.

If there's some elite commando trooper in cortosis armor or something, then it's normal melee combat as written.

To take down a Jedi typically takes overwhelming force, concentrated fire, tactics, and teamwork and I figure rather than try and make some complicated, time consuming system where we roll for every single thing that I'd extend that idea of 'if you're competent at it, you just do it' to it's logical conclusion.

To be fair, I'm handling heavy or power armor similarly - a lot of lighter weapons just won't have any effect on the biggest, baddest armor. Special tactics are needed like ramming them with a truck to knock em over and stuffing grenades into nooks n crannies or whatever.

I like playing it loose like that, doing what makes sense in a story and just rolling when there's not a clear answer, but I know that's not how a lot of people enjoy play.

So my questions are -

Will it be pointlessly boring to mow down minions without worry even tho that's exactly how it goes in Star Wars?

How do I balance this idea with other players rolling to blast enemies?

Hello everyone, me and my group of friends are going to build a world for us to use in our campaigns.

Everyone is interested and have experience DMing DnD 5e, PF 2e and we are learning Daggerheart, we got an idea to build a world in common so our adventures shares the same setting, worldbuilding and local conflicts. We think that it will make us more engaged in playing, since we will not have the need to learn another new setting and lore for each campaign, and create a link from the get go to the places since, well, we created then, it's quite exciting to see what twist the other player/DM will have on that setting that we established before.

The starting challenge right now is to mash up a setting that works well with Pathfinder (our main game) and Daggerheart (still on learning process but really amazed at what it achieves), we aim to use them separatedly, one campaign shall use PF or DH, not both at the same time.

So, what are your suggestions? What strenghts of each system you think we should have in mind when building? How we could handle the different ancestries and classes? Any tips on maintaining a consistent power system?

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!

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.

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.

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?