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freeware drop
Big ol' sheet of games curated by Dominic Tarason. Several games on here I was pleasantly surprised to see, like Hat World and Ruina.
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Triple Totalizations
there's a lot of ttrpg discourse out there. i have seen too much of it. Eventually you start to see it converging on a pattern of:
(I) "A game that does X can't exist"
(II) "And if it did, nobody would like it"
(III) "And if they did, they shouldn't"
each of these is annoying but at least the first two can be disproven, the third has to be a whole clash of philosophies. dueling in lava, choral soundtrack, the works
now you can refer to arguments you see as Category 1/2/3 Totalizations, if you so desire
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Scene Prompts - Jennagames
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine isn't as tightly structured as Princess Wing, but it does provide some guardrails:
1) The game is divided into chapters, that typically cover a length of time determined by the campaign genre
2) Each player can (and usually will) perform two XP Actions per chapter, with available XP action typically determined by campaign genre. These are usually specific emotional beats, or actions that become significant by having attention drawn to them, rather then their outcome.
3) After performing an XP action, your character "fades," or loses narrative focus.
All of this combines to form a revolving spotlight effect. If the spotlight falls on you, it helps to have a scene prompt ready!
Your scene prompts are bundled into quests. A full quest write-up contains:
1) A situation your character is presently involved in, or a situation they keep coming back to. This is the Quest itself.
2) Major goals, significant narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest a limited number of times. The GM determines when they've been fulfilled.
3) Quest flavor, minor narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest 1/chapter. The player can declare that quest flavor is happening without waiting for the GM's suggestion.
So! Of these, the quest flavor is the scene prompt tech closest to what I discussed with Princess Wing. The player decides that the scene will be about something in particular from their character material, and the scene will be about that. A quest's major goals work a little differently. I'd suggest they're prompts for the GM instead, scenes that the GM should be on the lookout to set up and create the opportunity for. I've heard the phrase "character flags" used for this kind of thing before.
[In practice, a Chuubo's game will probably see players saying "hey GM I have an idea for how to fulfill my major goal," and that's totally fine. It's a game that wants everyone to spend a little time in the director's chair, even if the GM has the most explicit power there.]
Much of this structure and prompt tech returns in The Far Roofs. This time, the quest flavor summons not just a narrative beat, but a specific emotional reaction to it from the player character, as determined by a Mood Roll. That's a lot to work with from just a couple lines!
Lastly, Far Roofs has a few prompts associated with its Mysteries and the neighborhoods of the Roofs.
The other prompts I've discussed here are linked to their games' progression systems. You get XP or other benefits from invoking them, which drives your character's story forward. The Errantry prompts, by contrast, are only there to spark ideas, characterize the element of the setting they're associated with, and invite players into the director's seat.
Scene Prompts - Princess Wing
I keep mentioning this bit of tech/framework so I might as well write out what I mean by it, with some examples. By the end of this series I want to demo how I'm writing scene prompts for my current project.
The first game that got me thinking about scene prompts as a distinct bit of design tech was Princess Wing. When you create a magical girl in PW, you fill out a table of your character's hobbies, interests, or personal traits, each corresponding to a card value in a poker deck. During the game's investigation phase, you play cards to set scenes based on those cards, like playing the 4 of Hearts to play out a bit of chemistry class (your character's strong subject), or the 10 of Clubs to play out a scene reflecting on your character's future dreams. If the scene advances the story, you tick up an investigation clock.
[Note: "Advances the story" is determined by the GM, which means it's possible for this to play out more restrictively for a specific group, but the game is clear that the GM isn't supposed to plan things out ahead of time so that information can only be found in math class, or a specific location. The players are invited to justify their scenes by introducing bits like "My club president might be helpful here" or "I've seen them before at my favorite restaurant," and the game flows much more smoothly if the GM is generally permissive about how scenes relate to the investigation.]
The combat phase is all about managing the cards you play to get your desired effects on the mechanically defined board-state. In the investigation phase, what you do doesn't determine the mechanical output, just the decision to set a scene at all. The clock ticks up the same regardless. Instead, choosing what kind of scene you want to play is making a decision about what feels interesting or sensible based on your prewritten Life Tags and random hand of cards. This is theoretically more limiting than "start any kind of scene you want," but... I don't always know what I want! Getting a bunch of scenes to choose from makes things easier for me, and can take things in directions that people weren't expecting, but appreciate anyway. That's why the scene prompts in Princess Wing are so intriguing to me: They put authorial/directorial responsibility in the hands of the players, but give you a little more support so you don't need to come up with the ideas ex nihilo.
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TTRPG Spotlight - Emergent
I picked up Emergent from an ongoing trans fundraising bundle. I struggle to read through all the character options and monsters right away, but...
This game is something special.
It has style, it has neat dice tech, it has fascinating ideas for scripting structure a campaign, it reminds me, in very good ways, of Monsters and Other Childish Things. I'm keeping an eye on this one.
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Getting Into Exalted, For Some Reason
The main thing I hear about Exalted is its maximalism. Your characters are the strongest and the coolest, there's mountains of lore, and there's rules for everything. I check the rulebook (3e) and it's almost seven hundred pages. That's a lot to read, but that's what I'm there for, right?
sorry there's how many expansion books?
hm
They do have an alternative, Exalted Essence. It's basically a parallel edition that covers all the types of Exalted at once, but it sells itself on being simpler... will that still give me the maximalism I'm looking for? It should, yeah, there's still multiple pretty large books.
...the current Essence crowdfunding campaign has some really nice deals on 3e material
...3e won't be so bad if I limit myself to just one type of Exalted, right?
and that's why i'm currently on course to get into Most Of Essence and 3e, But Specifically Dragon-Blooded Exalted
surely only good can come from this
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Odyssey Zine #1
I wrote an article for the new Odyssey zine! It's an intro to the Far Roofs, specially written for people who don't know the game at all.
Enjoy!
Translation as Curation
I'm a big fan of not having to do work myself, generally speaking. I like that there's people who go out and find cool things, to make it easier for other people to find cool things.
Media gets translated because it caught someone's interest enough to translate. I find that a useful filter. If you miss that it is a filter, that can give you a distorted perspective, but as long as you're aware of it, you can make use of it.
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Gnusto Nitfol Blorb and Frotz
I'm also a fan of this post for outlining different play preferences and the ways they overlap or contradict. You see attempts at this every so often, but very often they fall into the trap of "and that's why THIS particular preference is Real TTRPGing and others are lesser." This accounting avoids that pretty well.
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(no subject)
it finally clicked for me that "rpgsite" and "therpgsite" are completely independent websites that should never be confused with each other. walk not in the valley of confusion, as i have
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MORAN'S MIRACULOUS ROLE-PLAYING MULTIVERSE
I'm going to tell you about a bunch of games by Jenna Moran!
FOR FANTASY FANS: These are games with complex symbolic landscapes, a million little glimpses into larger stories, and they're literally designed for building OCs with strong personal aesthetics.
FOR TTRPG FANS: These games are largely diceless, with strong narrative infrastructure, and plenty of fuel for drama that can't be simply be solved through combat
You WILL have extended philosophical debates during play. This is a significant appeal for my particular circles.
Nobilis and Glitch
( These are the stories of the Age of Pain, and the war between Creation and the void... )
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, and the Far Roofs
( These are the stories of... what comes after. )
The Community
The Apocynum Press Itch collection gathers homebrew and fan materials that get posted to Itch.
Karma Chameleon is a pillar of the community. As well as their lovely art, they've made the Quest Set builder for managing Chuubo's and Glitch quests, and an interactive overview of recurring miraculous traits.
Here on Dreamwidth, we have the Jennafans Community!. On Discord, there's the Ninuan fan server.
Jenna Moran herself can be found at her personal site, Tumblr; and on Patreon, where she sometimes posts draft or preview material for the games mentioned. Her older fiction can be found at the Hitherby Dragons wiki
Finally, The Flood is not set in any of these worlds. It's a game about something else entirely (poetry farming). But it does feature its own version of the recurring Arcs scaffolding, so it may be worth a look.
Mew Trick (real)
Article on glitches and rumor. I found it in Critical Distance's link round-up so it might get passed around elsewhere too.
Dragonflycave was a pretty big inspiration for my own neocities. it's nice to see them still going
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PDF Hobby - Turn-based? But I already am
A write-up on turn-based RPGs (the video game kind)
There's a small number of people I follow who I trust with this kind of "basic" game design analysis. Always cool to see more of it.
TTRPG sportsmanship?
so i've been in a couple conversations recently about the idea of "playing to win" vs "playing to lose" in ttrpgs. Playing to win means taking the actions most likely to result in your victory (whether that's within a specific scene or within the overall campaign context) and playing to lose generally means taking whatever actions are most in-character, without concern for whether they actually bring your character closer to their goal.
...except, I'm not sure it always means that. Sometimes the way "play to lose" is used, it suggests "be okay with losing" instead. That's a different idea! Your behavior when you're trying to win, but accept the possibility of loss, is different from your behavior when you're not trying for a victory at all.
[As an aside: some of the games I focus on most are games with dedicated combat scenes where "do what's in-character without concern for victory" is either counterproductive or a false distinction. So I'm leery of descriptions of "play to lose" as fundamental to the hobby]
"Play to lose" is really weird advice to give when your game's player-side mechanics consist of ways to win, and ways to make winning easier, flashier, or more effective. It's mixed signals, at the very least. On the other hand, "don't be a sore loser" makes perfect sense in that situation. Even while players are trying to win, they need to accept the possibility of loss, or else, when they inevitably do, they won't be able to pick themselves up again
[As another aside: TTRPGs have such a weird relationship to loss in general. lose a video game you usually just try again, lose a board game, you shake your head and try again next week or decide to play a different game instead, but loss in a TTRPG often a permanent change in play or gets removed as an option completely in response to those kinds of permanent changes in play]
So as I'm thinking about "don't be a sore loser," I realize that, this isn't language I hear very frequently in TTRPG spaces? We very rarely talk about these things in terms of sportsmanship, and I'm not sure why. Off the top of my head:
1) culturally inherited aversion to sports, even as a turn of phrase
2) TTRPGs tend towards such high emotional and social investment that we avoid talking about them as "just a game" like the concept of sportsmanship leans on
now I won't act like sportsmanship is a single coherent and legitimate phenomenon we can talk about without any chance of miscommunication, but like, this is an already-existing idea that's extremely relevant to a lot of talk about social expectations at the table. So it's very weird that I don't see it invoked more often!
Am I missing something? Is it just a vocab difference I've missed? has "do what's good for the story" somehow replaced the concept of sportsmanship???
Raising sim combo meal
Drapline is just a demo, but a very funny one. Raise your dragon-daughter and tell her if it's okay to eat expensive meals, scenery, named NPCs, etc. It reminds me of Mushroom Musume in terms how it handles randomized events, but it feels like its own thing overall.
Cute Bite is from the team behind Cute Knight and Long Live the Queen. This time, the subject is a vampire attempting to regain her former powers. It cleaves closely to the Princess Maker/Cute Knight lineage, but it's a very well-executed version of the formula. I like the minigames!
Only after playing both of them in one day did I realize "who do you choose to eat" is an important gameplay decision in both of them. two nickels.
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fate/stay night good
i have finished the Heaven's Feel route of the visual novel Fate/stay night
...I feel like any kind of summary/thinkpiece I attempt will be insufficient, so I'll just say, I completely see how this would kick off a twenty year franchise. I was already getting inspired by it partway through, so I expect this to stick with me for a long time.
however it is unfortunate that finding interesting fanworks or discussion for this means sorting through the fanworks and discussion for the rest of the franchise, which I am less interested in. also 8tracks is down so i can't find fanmixes easily ;_;
so uh if anyone has songs they associate with various Fate characters lemme know
Rooftop Jam Retrospective
I ran a homebrew jam! I feel accomplished. It was fun to write my own work and fun to see what others came up with, like the Pied Piper storyline or Strigoi. I got entries from beyond my immediate circle of contacts and honestly that was my measure of success.
Will I do something like this again? Probably depends on if I get inspired enough to write something myself again. But I won't rule it out. I'm glad I got to do this.
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Magiamachy Epigraph
The project from my last post hasn't run out of inspiration yet, turns out knock-off grail wars are a lot of fun
It is the law of the world that miracles may only appear at the darkest hour.
When your strength has been spent, when your hopes have been crushed, when your spirit cries out in desolation, then, and only then, can fate be turned aside.
This law of the world, like so many others, has been tried, and tested, that humanity might learn its secrets and make the law their servant.
The Magiamachy exists to produce a miracle.